My experience with Vodafone has been simply great. Not even a single billing mistake in past 5 years. Vodafone is the best in the lot. No, I’ve not been paid by them to write this review. May be it’s just because the legacy of good practices of Vodafone (earlier Hutch / Orange had good customer service, if you remember) and Vodafone does have a global experience of servicing good part of the world, even some of the poorest countries.
Well, Airtel - great connectivity and great burglary. Customer service and satisfaction is an alien phrase to them. No one cares. For all practical reasons Airtel is much like BSNL. Airtel C-sat sucks big time. But get real man, this is India. We hardly care for quality and value. The country is just populous enough to bring a lousy customer experience to the market and still see it getting sold out in no time. For every disgruntled customer, you are having 1000 other guys waiting for the stuff like dogs with mouth wide open, tongues dangling out and wagging tails.
Ever seen hordes of people waiting outside even the lousiest of restaurants in town on weekends. People have no time to call up their friends but have all the time to wait outside the shoddy restaurants like beggars and that’s very much part of our existence. Whom do you blame? With so many disgrungtled customers here on mouthshut (you’ll really struggle to find out a single guy happy about Airtel, look at the numbers NO’s in the page), Airtel does not give a damn, their customer list is growing by the day. And why not, even at highest number of mobile connections in the world, India still scores low on mobile connections per 1, 000 people. Internet connectivity, don’t ask about it. India is placed at 54th place.
I don’t see a great result coming out of the debates here in MS. It will take a long while till the competition between cellular operators in India reaches anywhere close to car manufacturers or white goods manufacturers. Only alternative could be emergence of disruptive technologies (IP telephony at cheap prices), which is not likely, Thanks to very strong lobbying and kickbacks to government officials and ministers.