I recently had to use the videoconferencing facility in Reliance Webworld for a job interview. I started by going to their main website and located the addresses of the outlets near me. I discovered that all the telephone numbers given with those addresses were wrong. I submitted a query in the website, asking them to call me because all their numbers were wrong. The next day, I started looking up Reliance Webworld in Google and discovered a telephone number for a distant outlet on a website that was unrelated to Reliance Webworld.
As it looked different from the invalid numbers I’d seen in the main website, I tried it. It worked and I forced the person who answered the phone to give me some number that I could call to find out where the nearest outlet was that would have videoconferencing. She relented and gave me one number, saying that if it didn’t work, she couldn’t help me anymore. I finally located the nearest outlet and asked them to give me details about the videoconferencing by email.
They responded, giving me the costs for the room, the videoconferencing and the service tax. In the meantime, somebody called me from their main office, saying the usual things—they were very sorry for my trouble, they understood my concerns and they would do their best to assure me of good service. I told them about the wrong phone numbers and told them I had already heard from the outlet. They gave me the phone number for the zonal manager in case I needed help and he called me to tell me that I could contact him if I needed anything.
In the meantime, I got an email from a Reliance address that seemed to be answering my first query, saying that they didn’t know which outlet was closest to me and that I should look it up on the main website. Clearly, they have no way to close a query case and prefer to contact the customer at different times with different answers. I arranged the videoconference and reached the outlet on the appointed day 20 min early. The representative came in ten minutes before the videoconference and began dialing out to the Reliance bridge in Mumbai. The lady who picked up had trouble understanding this chap, so she kept asking him if there was anyone else there who could speak to her.
He insisted that she speak with him and this went on for a while. I gave him the mobile numbers for the IT people on the other side and the dialing and discussion continued for another 25 min while my image showed on the screen and sometimes, it was just a blank, blue screen. Fifteen minutes after the videoconference was supposed to start, the screen flickered and I saw and heard the other side for three minutes and they also could see and hear me. The screen went blank again and the debate and dialing continued. The other side offered to speak with me on the phone as the videoconference wasn’t working and I got up to leave with 15 min left for the end of the videoconference.
However, the representative told me that I would be charged regardless of whether I left or stayed so it would be better if they continued to try. We argued for a bit about their not being able to do anything about the bill because apparently being generated online, it was now carved in stone. Since there was already quite a bit of argument and the disruption of a job interview was upsetting in itself, I asked them what they were charging. The representative tried to charge me extra for the dialing out, something I didn’t see in the emails the store manager had sent me. So I put my foot down and asked him to show me that in the email. Their server didn’t work in the beginning and I waited for the representative to print out the email and show me. He finally had to waive the dialing out charge(Rs. 400) because it was not stated in the store manager’s email but I had to pay Rs. 3000 for a videoconference that didn’t happen(well, happened only for three out of thirty minutes) and service tax of 10% so it came to Rs. 300.
I asked him to give me the head office number and he said he didn’t have any numbers and gave me a tech support number. When I tried the number at home, I got a message that it too was invalid. I then went back to calling the numbers I had got before the videoconference—the zonal manager and the main office. The zonal manager told me that some ISDN cables had got cut in the zone where the interviewer was located because of which the connection was not made. He insisted that because they had to reserve the room, they had to charge me.
I pointed out to him that he was charging for a service that he didn’t deliver and that the representative should have realized that there was some problem because he had already been trying for 25 min when the videoconference clicked for three brief minutes and went off again. And the bridge lady could have realized that the ISDN lines were cut in the other zone. But there was no co-ordination and no communication, not before the videoconference when they were responding to my email query, and not then. They claimed all their other videoconferences on the same day in the same outlet were just fine. If this was the case, it should have been a stronger alert that there was something up with the ISDN on the other side.
I said this also to the lady I spoke to in the business office in Mumbai: it wasn’t Reliance Webworld’s fault that the ISDN lines were cut but they should have had a method in place to know by a certain point in time during a 30 min videoconference(plus ten minutes for buffering) that the videoconference wasn’t working because there was a problem on the other side. If so, they could have asked me to reschedule and then asked me to pay when I actually had a videoconference. Instead, they charged me for sitting in a room to sit and look at an image of myself on the screen or at a blank blue screen, drink water and listen to the representative confuse the bridge lady.
Though the lady in the Mumbai business office was very polite that day and assured me that she would try to get me some refund because my case was genuine, she later wrote that Reliance was such a big organization that they couldn’t make any mistakes. It was the other party’s fault and they were sorry that I had had a bad experience but that they hoped I would continue to patronize Reliance Webworld for videoconferences. If you have a way to charge failed attempts to videoconference to your company or to the other party, you can go ahead with Reliance Webworld. If it’s coming out of your pocket and you can think of another use for Rs. 3300, then just insist on a phone conversation with the other side and travel there if the phone conversation warrants it.