Update - July 4, 2010
I have been using Airtel DTH since one year and the service have been satisfactory as never had to interact with their customer service. My nightmare began when I upgraded by existing Airtel DTH service to HD service to watch FIFA quarterfinals.
On June 30, I applied for HD service through their website. I received call from their sales office promptly within 2 hours. The sales man (Anirban Bhattacharya) informed that Airtel is giving special offer to their existing customers and I have to pay Rs 2350 and all current & newly added HD channels will be available for "life time".
This sounded strange to me and I again confirmed whether this will be for a life time or a stipulated period of time (which is quite possible) but he insisted that the offer is for the life time. Then I paid the money through IVR and provided him my customer-id and registered phone number. He promised that the installation of new HD STB will be done between 24-48 hours. I paid through my credit card and I found from bank website that the money got successfully credited to Airtel DTH account.
As I didn’t get call in next 24 hours, I called up their customer care number (1800-102-8080)next day and informed them that I didn’t receive any call from installation (so called technical team) engineers. The call center executive said that I will receive call with in 1 hr. As I didn’t get any call within 1hr, I called up the customer care and they again promised that installation will be done in next 24 hours. As nothing happened till next day, I called up Hyderabad’s local Airtel DTH agent (040-65990538) who had installed the Airtel DTH service previously at my home. They confirmed that they received an work order but they don’t have any HD STB in stock and promised to call back next day if they receive the stock. I never received any call back next day from them and started to followup with them and finally the service engineer came to my home on Jul 2 evening with HD STB.
The service engineers were so novice, they could not connect HDMI cable to my TV and setup the STB as STB was setup in 580p resolution while my TV supports 1080p. During the installation, I was not in at home but told them over phone to set the STB in standard 720p / 10080p but they could not comprehend what I was talking about.The service engineers were in hurry and told that my TV is not working. I insisted them to leave the STB at home and when I returned home, I connected to STB through component cable and switched the resolution of STB to 1080p and then connected it to TV and it worked flawlessly and I could watch demo channel 100. I was happy and I was relieved that I could watch the FIFA matches. I called up the service engineer to enable my HD STB and provided him old and new STB & view card numbers written in the box. He told that he will activate in next 10mins.
But my happy-ness was shot lived. After an hour (after numerous phone calls), the service engineer informed that there is no "recharge" available in my account to activate the HD service. Since then, I followed up with the customer care and service engineers but nothing improved. They gave menumerousservice request numbers, acknowledged the problem from their side (after I provided Bank’s reference number) and kept on saying that the problem will be resolved in next 24/48 hours.
So far, nothing resolved. My emails to their customer care were unanswered. My calls to customer care were answered bluntly (in polite expression). When I asked for refund / compensation, they kept on saying "wait for next 24 hours".
The conclusion is, I made a serious mistake in paying money to Airtel DTH for HD service upgrade. Their customer care executives and service engineers are untrained and their systems are nothing but screwed-up up (number of times, they say that their systems/servers are down for maintenance).
My recommendation is, stay away for Airtel DTH unless you want to get into customer care nightmare.
But I should mention one thing, their HD STB is superior in quality with respect to their standard STB. While with standard STB, the signal quality hovers around 40-60% and signal strength around 60-70%; with HD STB, the signal quality is 100% and signal strength is 70% (using same dish and cable).
September 19, 2009
Last month I moved to AirtelDTV from TataSky. After reading MouthShut reviews, I thought it’s not a good decision to move to AirtelDTV but my experience with Airtel is good. I purchased my package+STB online and selected the installation date & time. Within hours, I received SMS with customer/subscriber-id. Next day, I got call from local (Hyderabad) technician for installation and they delivered the STB, dish & cable and installed/activated the service. In my opinion, the quality of picture & sound ( I have 5.1 home theater with HD TV set) and “electronic program guide” are far superior compared to TataSky though the service becomes inaccessible when it rains (TataSky is better wrt this). The 1-800 number is only good for automatic messaging system. To catch hold of customer service, it better to send email / web-notification. For the installation related tech issues, the fastest was is to reach they local office ( for Hyderabad – 040 65990538) who should be able to resolve problem (I think, TataSky’s customer service is superb … specially for non internet savvy customers).
Overall, I am a happy (except when it rains) customer of AirtelDTV.