Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you literally feel like you are floating in total bliss? Once I was, when I came across a few reliable Indian shopping portals on the internet targeted towards the Indian diaspora. After some time spent on evaluating some of these websites, I decided to give Sify a go for three reasons.
1) I completely liked the idea of this whole portal outlook, single log-on feature, reliable brand name and backed by a company you can somewhat trust.
2) Reasonable product lines, prices, speed.
3) Been around for a quite some time as others were just playing hide and seek.
For the first timer, from registration to confirming my order, the entire process was seamless. I was totally intrigued by the fact that the whole process took less than a few minutes and that I have the ability to track my order, email confirmation and all that ’make you feel good and comfy’ aspects of things. Basically, contents of the site were well organized and finding what I wanted was a breeze. I was just a happy shopper and blew a few hundred bucks for the convenience and comfort that the site offered me.
Ok.. What you read so far, would probably be my comments about SifyMall a year ago.
Well, here is the gist of my recent shopping experience with Sify. A couple of months back, I found an item that was on sale and decided to buy it. This time, since I have moved to a new address, I thought I would change the billing address on my profile only to find out that the system is not accepting my zip/postal code anymore. The only valid input criteria for entering zip/postal codes is that they have to be in numeric format. Well, there are some countries in the world that uses alpha-numeric zip/postal codes and unfortunately I happen to be living in one of them.
And without the correct billing address, most credit card authorizations would fail. Sure enough, I went ahead and placed my order with my current address and a fake numeric zip code since that was my only choice. The order went through, and I recieved a notification from Sify saying that they are processing my order. Even after a week later, nothing happened. So I called their customer service and I was told, that my order has been withheld since Sify is waiting on some third party verifier to verify my credit card information. Hello! you dont do something like that for over a week.
Fair enough, I explained them what really happened. And they said, sorry, that they cant do anything about it and the order will be withheld for a period of time, after that it will be automatically cancelled. I said, thats fine and hope they correct the zip code issue sometime soon, so that I can continue with my future purchases. But to the date of this writing, I dont think they fixed anything. Oh! did I mention that I also had to pay the differences due to exchange rates(order cancelled date - order posted date) to my credit card company.
No big deal, but what peeved me off is them not heeding to their customers concern and dont even have any courtesy to write back even after you send them twice inquiring about the same issue. And their live Chat customer service feature, is pretty damn useless.
In this world of internet everything and competitive businesses, companies should strive to make things better constantly and be a step ahead in surpassing, if not, at least meeting customer expectations to their fullest satisfaction. Conduct surveys, analyse markets, ask for opinions on how to improve product lines, usability issues, and most importantly - learn how your competitors do business and capitalize on their mistakes. When you know that your competitor is only a click away for any consumer, why would you not want to do things right?
PS: I just read other reviews on RediffShopping before posting mine, and it occurs to me that most of them are still in their primitive stages when it comes to addressing their customer’s needs. Oh well!!