‘Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line.’ Or what they actually mean is ‘Your call is NOT important to us. Please hang up.”

I wonder is it only me who faces bad customer care services on any product that I buy – be it internet, phone connection, air ticket, banking or there are other people like me as well?

How many times has it happened to you that you called a customer care service and had to wait for half an hour before actually speaking to the customer care executive? And the moment you started speaking, the phone got disconnected. And you went through the entire harrowing process once again. Do they really deserve to be called customer ‘CARE’ staff or should we call them customer ‘UNCARE/harassment/ irritation/annoyance/troubling’ staff (whatever you want to call them- choice is yours).

Last year, in August Qantas put a customer on hold for a whopping 15 hours!! He must have reached his destination by the time he got connected to the airline customer care staff.

If you have plenty of time at your disposal, you can call BSNL customer care. I thought that the attitude of low accountability to work and towards customers of BSNL customer care was due to the fact that BSNL is a public owned company. However the rot is spreading even to the private sector companies. Although Reliance customer care assures you that your complaint would be resolved in 24 hours, it normally takes 10-15 days to solve a problem. On top of it when you call them again they say that the complaint has been resolved and cancelled from their end. The only sad part in the story is that complaint is never resolved on poor customer’s end but on only on paper.

TATA Docomo customer care tops my list of worst experience that one can have with the customer care department. They provide wrong information to the customers, misbehave with customers especially females, talk rudely and do not reply to the customer emails (even the senior management).

Recently Jet Airways started a massive sale of two million tickets. But what it did forget was to ramp up its customer care staff to cater to the needs of two million customers. The result- customers got stuck on hold for hours before finally getting through to a customer care staff.

The question that I or maybe millions of customers across India must be asking in their minds is ‘Why do Companies not take their customer care departments seriously?’ Is our private sector also going the public sector way. Just because we are a country of billion people so they know if they lose one customer they will get another.

Last month on Makemytrip when I booked a flight, I was promised a discount coupon for my hotels bookings. When I tried to use the coupon code it was not working. Makemytrip customer care kept me oscillating between their airlines and hotels departments each saying that it is the problem of the other department not theirs. Neither the airline department customer care executives nor the hotel department customer care executives had any clue what to do. Finally they put the blame on the technical department. I gave up after wasting half of my day and wrote to the senior management who came to my rescue and helped resolve the issue.

TIME is the most precious thing that customers do not have these days. I think the most important function of a customer care should be to value their customers’ time. I think companies should start taking their CRM (customer relationship management) really seriously. Not only will it solve the agony of their customers who fight the battle of reaching out to customer service agents everyday but also help to save advertising and marketing costs of the company. As it is well said, “a happy customer tells one friend but an unhappy customer tells everybody