I would like to bring to everyone’s notice the falling standards in Airtel customer care which used to be its USP at some point of time.I recently took a new prepaid mobile connection from airtel and have been regretting it since then.From day one I have started receiving promotional SMS and automated calls from them at odd times of the day, sometimes reaching up to 5 SMS in a day.
I decided to register my number in their DO NOT DISTURB registry and that is when I found out about their customer care.On calling 121, I kept on searching in their IVRS menu but could not find an option for adding my number to DND registry nor option to talk personally to a customer care representative.Finally after a long time I found the option where it said press 9 to talk to a representative but in reality on pressing 9 it told me to send an SMS to 121 and my query will be resolved in 24 hrs !!!
There is no way of being able to talk to a person to lodge a complaint and get a complaint number !!!! What a great way of avoiding accountability.Anyway I sent an SMS to 121 explaining my problem and promptly got a automated reply saying my query will be resolved within 24 hrs. Nothing happened for 4 days when finally I looked up their site and saw that I could contact their nodal officer if I am not satisfied with customer care.
I sent a mail to the nodal officer and again got a prompt automated reply saying my issue will be resolved soon.Again..same result with no action from their side. The phone number of their nodal officer mentioned on the website is also an automated one which does not respond.To top it all I received an SMS saying that they hope my query was resolved to my satisfaction !!!!I have no idea how to get to talk to someone in airtel and get a complaint number for my issue so that I can go to TRAI or consumer forum with this. Without a complaint number they will not entertain a complaint.Can someone help me out with this.