Speaking to Orange’s customer service gives me high blood pressure everytime!! And I don’t mean figuratively, I mean it literally. The customer service agents are totally useless and refuse to use their brains to solve problems. In the last four years, I have had so many bad experiences that I can write a whole book about Orange customer careless service.
On one particular night, the agent kept forgetting my name even. She kept referring to me as Mr.Khan instead of Mr. Jain. I am sure thats the way Orange’s bored customer service agents have fun. And guess, what, even the threat of withdrawing the service doesn’t bother them. They promptly tell you the procedure for disconnection.
The network is good usually. But I have had problems in my area (Kandivali East) with the network. And some weird problems that Orange failed to own. People were getting missed calls from my numbers although I never called them. IT IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE!! I got a call from someone asking if I had called them 6-7 times. I said no and they must’ve mistaken the number. The guy said he’d just redialled on the missed call. I reported this to Orange and they said its not possible.
Later, the same thing happened to my friend on BPL MObile too. Orange’s explaination was that the person was trying to harass me. I told them the guy who called me didn’t make any threats or anything - he just wanted to know why I had been calling his number. Thank goodness, this didn’t happen to someone with a young daugher, or else I would’ve been in BIG trouble.
And do I need to write about network congestion?? I guess every cell user suffers from that. SMSs undelivered are common too. I get SMS from orange about missed calls - strangely, all the while my phone is on and has good reception. And I don’t see any missed calls on my cell. So how does Orange report missed calls. Because their network cannot handle the calls and they won’t invest in upgrading the equipment to handle more traffic.
The agents are whimsical. Mine is a corporate account. Sometime the agents accept request from me and at other times they insist on a letter from the company. They can’t seem to make up their mind. Then I wanted to get the phone transferred to friend’s name. Orange’s answer - goto a Orange shoppe that open only till 7PM and that too only on weekdays. Great, so I should leave my work and goto the Orange shoppe. How customer friendly.
On another Orange number I have, I asked for international roaming from the airport. Orange says you are not worthy. They will have to conduct another verification and determine the deposit amount and it will take 5 days to do that!!! So if you leave for a short trip in a hurry then forget international roaming. I tried to reason with them, you can conduct the verification in parallel and if you don’t find it proper you can disable roaming.
The answer - No!! I asked what verification did they do the first time when I took the connection. The answer - this is different. Why the f**k couldn’t they do all the verifications in the beginning anticipating future needs?? I guess the customer careless service isn’t that bright.
You may ask why I have been enduring them for the last four years - one is that it is a corporate account and two is laziness. And others don’t seem to be any better either. But now I am going to disconnect Orange. Just looking at other options. Maybe Tata Indicom. Enough is enough.
My advise is stay away from cell phones. Once the subscriptions dip, maybe then the service providers will think of raising service standards. As for Orange - No thank you. Like the fruit, the service is sour!!!