’We bought Home Town Gift Voucher of Worth 15, 000/- from home town marathalli. In an undue event, we lost the gift vouchers, and asked the Home town customer service to block the vouchers and release the duplicate vouchers to us, as we had not purchased anything till that time. But the response to us by Customer service people (Mr. Prakash and Relationship manager Mr. Subhash) was that "Sir voucher is like cash for us, so its not possible to release duplicate one. But if you are requesting so we can send a mail to Mumbai head-office, and will see what can be done. But there is no automatic blocking process, so blocking depends how alert is the person sitting at customer desk, so he/she has to practically cross check your voucher number on everybody’s gift voucher usage. Its a manual process and we cant give you surety that we can practically block it !".
That’s sounded quite ridiculous to me, because we had already paid in cash to home town but had bought nothing!! There should be a process in place, when home town has such a big item ranges from 100 Rs to 1 Lakh Rs!
Nevertheless, we agreed that Home Town Bangalore should send a mail to Mumbai office. After 2 weeks, when we enquired back, we got a reply that still they were waiting for our "consent" for blocking the vouchers, and had not send the mail to Mumbai head office!. Looks like, even at Relationship manager level there is no "Care" for customer’s money. I am not sure if Rs. 15, 000/- kind of amount doesn’t persuade the customer service, then what else would ?? Anyway, we are still waiting for the reply from Home Town. Will keep posting, when there is an update.
Update: We finally met Relationship Manager, who co-operated. A copy of FIR was submitted and we got the 15K worth purchase from HomeTown.