When I first heard about the concept of freecharge.in, I was quite excited owing to the fact that all those bucks that I dish out for recharging my mobile, can now fetch me something extra. This comes in the form of coupons that I can utilise at the transactions carried out at a 3rd party vendor. If I do a recharge of Rs. 200, I could be getting 4 coupons of McDonalds(could be some other joint based on your choice) of Rs 50 each that you can exchange at the McD counter while buying some stuff at a given base amount.
It has been quite a while that freecharge has hit the market and has gained a lot of publicity in terms of a huge number of fans that are visible on their facebook page that shows their impeccable marketing strategy.
But this is just one side of the story. The other part is not as rosy as the former seems.
Freecharge.in charges Rs. 10 flat on each of your transaction for delivering the coupons but does not ensure the coupon delivery. It has tie-ups with some third class courier companies like Trackon couriers that do not take the responsibility of the deliveries. There is another aspect to this. Sometimes, the delivery guys act smartly and keep the coupons with themselves instead of delivering it to the intended party, whenever they notice a Freecharge envelope. Post this activity, the courier service wrongly updates the online portal that either the house was locked or it was missed in between. This has happened to me at least 4-5 times when the tracking portal shows that my shipment has been dispatched from Mumbai but it never reached Pune in spite of being dispatched 10 days ago.
Some people have also complained that after recharging their mobiles through freecharge, they did not even get the balance that was supposed to be transferred.
The intent of the company is quite obvious from the fact that they have not even mentioned a customer care number on their website. I mean how could you get the status of the delivery of your coupons. All you can do is to drop a mail on their customer care email just to expect their response after two frustrating days.
These guys are not at all concerned for any of the complaints or suggestions that they come across. Instead of delivering the coupons, they can either go for a specific code generation that can be sent on your mobile which you can show at the third party joint OR they can even send an itinerary on the customers mail id that can be shown as a print out.
All in all, the concept is nice, but if they continue operating the same way, it is going to spell doomsday for them and soon they would be out of the business.