This article is dedicated to all such mobile subscribers who have fell to the tricks of mobile companies have fought endlessly and landed up with nothing
This is my experience of working with two most recognized brands in Indian mobile business where working for their call centre we come to know the inside out of their functioning, as a consumer we see daily a new grievance being aired in all kinds of media, companies claim consumers to be their kings, but it is not so.
US consumers are considered to be too doubtful and if you give them a ’terms & condition’ statement to be read before purchasing a product, they will make you explain each and every point in that contract document of service agreement, but still they are not as smart as Indian subscribers, but companies of any kind, banking, mobile and other service companies will have ’terms and condition’ document woven to their benefit and not consumer benefit.
Well while working with this first ’abc’ company I found till what extent a company can go down in treating its subscribers, for a mobile company they have a front-end team which manages their daily call handling and correspondence and handling other customer communication, this company is one of the most recognized telecom brands today in India, they also have different departments for problem resolution, when a customer care executive forwards a complaint to the respective queue, they convey a ’Turn Around Time? TAT time to the subscriber to the customer by which their problems are SUPPOSED to be resolved, but it’s not always the same.
For this mobile company the outbound department logs details in customer account saying ’the customer was called, problem was resolved, case closed’, poor customer he never received a call of such kind, he calls back the customer care executive(CCE) and asks him what?s the status on his complaint, the CCE will reply sir your problem is resolved you did not receive any call, the customer is surprised ’hey I did not receive any call’.
For such debacle when the concerned manager of that department was questioned by a company auditor why all this is being done, they reply saying that they have a deadline to close customer cases by a certain weekday, so to achieve their targets they just close customer cases without even providing them resolution, and the manager giving this reply was cool and calm, just like our Laloo, FEARLESS.
No mobile company can have perfect billing system, while working with this ’abc’ company I went through lots of instances where customers where unnecessarily charged, without their notice, I was myself their customer, imagine I received my April 2003 bill by post in April 2004, every time without complaining I used to pay off my bill at their collection center as I knew internally the working of this company was really sick.
But they came up on my nerves when they disconnected my services a month after my payment cheque had got cleared.W when I contacted them saying that why my services where discontinued, they reply me that my cheque got bounced, whereas the same cheque after getting bounced as I had to change my bank account as I was shifting my residence.
I again deposited money in the same account after three days the cheque got bounced, they took off the money a week after that from my account, then 23 days later I find my account getting disconnected, they asked me to fax the bank statement of clearance which I felt was not to be done by me as these mobile companies have the fate of your connection written on a notepad, they have mass disconnections, suppose the mobile company has featured your name in their notepad for disconnection today, you paid your money yesterday in cash, VOILA today your account is going to get disconnected , and then you bang your head, call them up, send them faxes of your receipts or visit their company shops.
Indian subscribers are also bit weird when BSNL and MTNL were the only players in our license raj, there were no help lines, no customer care centers, and surprisingly nobody used to complain about them, today mobile companies present themselves to be true, transparent in billing and top-notch in customer services, its just a window display, if you open the closet, many skeletons would tumble out, they damn care about customer service, when you see mobile business booming and its growing by leaps and bounds.
Today a mobile company wants to drive the customer revenue by providing various schemes for voice based revenue, they charge special rent for such schemes and dish out good amount of money from subscribers, they want to drive customers to use their value-added services like ring tone downloads, gprs, internet access, mms services, game downloads its a great market for them and other third party content developers for such applications.
Coming back to billing goof-ups, my friend who was with me in the second ’xyz’ company call center, again a premium brand.
He was charged for sending international messages whereas he lived alone in Mumbai, and no relative or friend to message abroad, another case a friend of mine charged for downloading poly tunes which are not supported by his Samsung model.
even for certain areas in Mumbai mobile companies know they have being getting frequent complaints of network, if you ask some one at levels forwarding them complaints of customer your supervisor will tell you *’abhi bhaga de isko, kuch goli dekar’ *Because even he knows he will not be able to resolve the network issue.
So every time you get irritated on a customer service executive or his supervisor, they will pass on the customer feedback, but the final action is to be taken by management of company, so a contact center then turns out to be a center facing customer music rather than giving solution to its customer
More instances and details on working of mobile companies......