I like to have good callertunes on my mobile service because it gives the caller something nice to listen to before you attend to the call. The usual ring, ring ring is quite a bore!
I had a very nice callertune through my service provider (vodaphone) for which I would pay a monthly rent of Rs. 30/-. It was an English song and quite liked by all those who heard it. But this callertune has been in use for quite some time and I decided to change it to an AR Rehman song yesterday.
I did this and I was informed by vodaphone that I will be charged a sum of Rs. 30/- per month which again was fine with me. But when the new song was activated I found that everytime someone called me, the first message was an advertisement from the company, saying that if anyone wants to copy my callertune, or get more information about callertunes, he or she has to do this or that! After that the callertune which I asked for and am paying for is played. I was infuriated to hear this.
The company has no business to advertise on a product or service for which I am paying without taking my permission. It made me feel cheap, as though the callertune was a complimentary service provided by the company. I am a physician and I get many calls from patients and colleauges. Such a message coming each time someone calls me makes me feel extremely cheap.
Subsequently, I called the vodafone customer care service several times.
I got the same reply, that nothing could be done because the change had to be made by someone else who was not available at that time. A couple of the employees even had the cheek to say that they had the permission of TRAI to do what they were doing.
But when I asked them the full form of TRAI, they were at a loss of words! I then sent e-mails to their customer care centre expressing my deep dis-satisfaction with this practise of theirs.
And I got automated replys that my complaint will be attended to in a couple of days! I wrote back to them saying that as a customer of vodaphone since the last 15 years I expect a human being to reply to me and not an automated message. But, as expected there was no reply to this either.
This morning I tried to call Vodaphone’s Head of customer complaints. But I was stone-walled time after time. I gave up after that. I just decided to cancel my callertune subscription, which was fortunately done in a very short time. I may lose Rs. 30/- but that is fine with me.
If such practises continue, I will definitly change my mobile service provider. Today I realised that brand names are nothing . It is the people who run the company which make all the difference.