Aah! I was so happy, Airtel had served me for almost 6 years . and I got my broadband and landline installed in my Lajpat Nagar, Delhi home in July 2006. The promptness, deliverables, adherence to committments were all fine until one fine day.
In the month of Sep 2011, suddenly my ID got de-activated. The same ID which we use to login to thier site and make payments. I called up 121 and followed up numeriously, but I did not get a resolution. Giving up, I started walking to Airtel Stores to make payments, which actually was again troublesome as thier Swipe machines never work.:-o.
Suddenly, by entire DSL ID, 12016288 got de activated from thier switch and this happened on 16th Feb 2012. I kept calling airtel 121 and I kept on getting wierd responses. Responses which werent acceptable at all . not atleast in this day when Airtel is no more the only player, as was the case 6 years back.
At 121, I spoke to atleast 14 agents and supervisors and after 4-5 days of headaches, I finally decided to give away my airtel connection and move to some other ISP. Now, they had a problem with that also, as the retention team, just was not letting this happen. I can understand, that they were trying to retain a customer whose Age on Network and ARPU was high, but the best part was that they were trying to retain me without resolving the issues. I was still witout an Internet connection.
I then decided to write to the Nodal Officer, and that was again a shocking experience for me. At the nodal officer I again faces a lot of problems, which are listen as under:
There is not One but many Officers following up on your case, and everytime you write a mail, you get the response from a different person alltogether. This takes you through rounds of explaining the entire problem again n again to different people. Thier responses clearly indicate that they dont event read the trailing mails to get a sense of what’s going on.
When I ask for Deactivation, they respond with Re-activation timelines and when I agree for re-activation, they give me a reference number for De-activations. A BUNCH of JOKERS, I must say.
No Body, even at the Nodal office was able to trace my details, even after I sent the bills, and other communications mails( like quote tracker, payments alert etc) and they kept saying that I never had an internet connection.
I feel very disapointed to say, that Airtel Nodal Office is highly incompetent and I unable to resolve the escalated queries.
In the meanwhile, I happened to check my registered email and I saw a mail from Airtel in month of December, stating that my Internet is de-activated and I only hold a landline connection now. A fell from my chair laughing, As I had never requested for this to happen. I believe, common people would understand that Internet is more important that the landline, and the best part was, I did not even ask for a De-Activation.
Now, after this series of disappointing events, I can safely say that Airtel has lost it. May be they are just in Awe of becoming the biggest operator in Broadband in India. But they must understand, they have become this by the virtue of their customers. If airtel continues to do this, they will be left Mixing Mithais as they are seen doing in one of thier ADs.
Cheers Airtel, way to go. Har friend Zaroori hai, but remember, Customers bhi Zaroori hain.