To say that I was conned is an understatement. We had called to service our Aqua Guard water filter and dialed the customer care number of Eureka Forbes, or what we thought was the number. The phone ID also showed Eureka Forbes. They assigned me a technician, Fasil(phone # 636301xxxx), the next day, and as soon as he came, he showed me that the pH balance was 550 and there was an urgent need to replace the candles. He quoted ₹5000 plus his service charges of ₹550. I asked him how come these are costly. I had an Alfa water filter in my Mumbai house, where the candles cost under ₹1200. He said it is Eureka Forbes and no ordinary company and things are bound to be costlier.
He was trying various candles as a replacement. One of them, he admitted, did not work. They were all removed from a plastic cover. Later, he was struggling to fix the candles to their points. It was evident that he was not adequately trained at his job. His assistant was just a pile-on, doing nothing.
After struggling for 30 minutes, he fitted it and showed me a pH balance of 130. I was satisfied.
He asked for ₹5500 at the end of the job, I told him it was too much and to give me a discount. Immediately, he reduced the service fee of ₹500 and raised a digital invoice of ₹ 5000.
After he left, the water filter began to leak after filling. The auto cut-off was not working. I called Fasil; he said he would come over in the morning. However, despite several calls to him, he did not turn up and kept lying that he is in my vicinity and will be here any moment.
I escalated the matter to the Customer Care number, and to cut a long story short, they claimed that they had no record of my ever having called them. One Chandru(Services Manager) kept telling me that I have gone to a private/local technician who did not belong to EF. And that there was no track of my phone number. And furthermore, instead of sympathizing and trying to help me with the solution, he was ill-mannered and uneducated. He was shouting that I should not have checked the EF ID of Fasil and verified his authenticity. He showed an invoice of ₹3700 or so. He claimed that there was no name or Fasil.
This Chandru added that if I need a service, I need to pay another ₹550 or so just for a visit. Spare parts will cost extra.
I told him that I do not want to pay EF for the visit as it was their number listed for customer care. It is not for me to verify what is genuine and what is not, as long as the company name appears prominently on the website/portal. I said I am forced to escalate those issues as he was of no help. Nonchalantly, go ahead, and escalate if you want to. That was how this moron’s attitude was.
After that, there were several “red” calls on my phone from Eureka Forbes. I did not pick any of them and after two days, I have blocked these numbers. For now, I have lost sense of which number is genuine and which is not. All appear like scams.
I refused to pay, and we were willing to gift it to Fasil.
My question, for which I will probably never get an answer is, how did Fasil know that I have a Eureka Forbes Aqua guard water filter if the company had not raised a visit ticket?
The worst part is the water was tasting brackish and smelly.
My wife and I decided to discard the water filter, as anyone who drinks from it will also fall sick. Not even my worst enemy?
We bought a Dolphin, and the technician, Gnaneshwar, after inspecting the Aqua Guard, showed me that one of the candles was from Kent! Can you believe it? Aqua guard service technician fitting a Kent water candle! The pH balance was now 400 and above the limits. Gnaneshwar said there was no filter at all and the water was directly flowing from the borewell.
He told a long and engaging story of how water filters are cleaned through chemicals, repacked, and resold online as new products. There were also several spurious candles in the market.
My anger is not with Fasil or whatever his real name was. My anger is towards someone who knows nothing about customer satisfaction and is on the defensive instead of helping a customer. Even assuming that I erred in calling a local technician, that was no way to talk to a customer.
I have thrown away the filter after paying ₹5000 and treated it as a bad loss. But the point of my message is that be very, very careful while dealing with this brand.
The best part is I got a mail from the company asking me for feedback, with 5 as being Most satisfied. You can well expect my feedback and what it was. If there were -1 or -2, I would have posted that. My pertinent point is that if they insisted that I did not connect with the right Eureka Forbes number, and there was no trace of my call, how did they get my mail ID and blatantly ask for my feedback?
My blunders:
I did not check the ID of the technician like I always do.
I did not check the candles being fitted as I was busy on a work call. I was not feeling too good that day and missed both points.