I have been using Airtel network for almost 10 years. Even though the call rates were never cheap, I liked Airtel because of their great coverage and customer care. However, things have suddenly changed over the last year or so. I’ve never had such horrible experience as I have over the last year.
Firstly I have no idea why they have this customer care. There is no co-ordination between the executives at all! I wonder if they keep any logs of the customer complaints.
I wanted to start blackberry services on my mobile. I called 121 in order to find the rates. I was rather pleasantly surprised when the executive informed me that at 299 I will get unlimited internet, 10 email config and blackberry messenger. I asked them to activate this plan.
They took down the request to activate this plan and I called 7070 as directed to get technical help in configuring emails. The executive now informed me that you do not get internet in the 299 plan. I was shocked as the other executive had specifically said that you do, and I had even received a sms saying this was a special offer etc.
But this technical executive insisted that there was no such offer, and that whenever there is a blackberry related query I should always call 7070 and not 121. The executives at 121 do not know all the details!
This really irritated me. As a first time blackberry user, I am not aware of 7070. If the executives at 121 are so dumb, Airtel should automatically redirect me to the correct department when I start asking about BB. Moreover why give incorrect information, when you are not aware? And what about that sms declaring special offer on the 299 plan! That was totally uncalled for!
Anyway I did get the 299 plan activated. I was asked to wait for 4 hours and the service would be activated. I waited 4 days. Then called up again. The executive told me I had asked to deactivate the plan and not activate it. How can I deactivate something I never had? Anyway after a lot of arguing he finally agreed to "re-activate" this plan. This time I even noted down the call #(863985895)as I was getting really irritated.
I again waited a day and nothing was activated. I called back with the reference number. But was informed there was no such reference number! I had to tell this executive the whole story all over again and then ask for an activation. The call reference#this time was F866513192(dunno if this is true). Finally it was activated. However, I still get calls asking me why I want to disconnect my BB services. This is so frustrating! I keep telling them I do not want to disconnect anything.kindly keep the service running.
They do tell you that your call is being recorded. They do give you reference #s to your calls. Yet I wonder what kind of information they actually maintain in these calls.
And finally.am I the only one who is facing horrible signal strengths these days? Initially I tried 3G. It was horrible. The signal would fall rapidly and calls would get disconnected. Then I switched to 2G signals again, but the problems persist. Most of my family members use Airtel and they are having the same problem. We used to put up with high charges and not so friendly tariff plans only for the good signals. But since even that has deteriorated, I think its time to switch to another network.