I had purchased an Acer Laptop at Acer Mall, Malleswaram, Bangalore. They offered me a Tata Photon+ device on additional payment of Rs. 800. I had provided them with the right address. I had also provided them a photocopy of my driving license, which contains this address. Now, my driving license also happens to contain two of my older addresses. Whenever I would shift my residence, I would obviously get my driving license updated.
1) When I received a Welcome call from a Tata Photon+ customer service executive, I discovered that someone had simply taken the first(and thus old) address mentioned in my driving license and filled it into my Tata Photon+ records. I immediately raised this issue, and asked the executive to rectify the problem. The request was taken.
I am not complaining about this first mistake. Such things happen. What really pissed me off was the sheer incompetence that was displayed later.
2) I received another ‘welcome’ several days later. The address had still not been updated. I had to repeat the whole complaint to the executive.
3) Another few days later, I received an SMS saying that my address couldn’t be verified. I was asked to contact customer service to avoid getting my service disconnected. I was like “What?! I’ve been trying to tell these guys how they bungled things, but they just won’t listen!”
Anyway, I called up customer service and repeated the whole complaint….yet again.
4) A couple of days later, I got an SMS saying that my connection has been suspended since they couldn’t verify my address. This time, I went ballistic. I called up customer service and asked them to cancel my connection. I didn’t want to waste any time with these jokers.
5) But the fun didn’t end there. They said I would have to physically visit one of their customer service centres to get the connection cancelled. They gave me the address of a centre at Marathahalli(which is the closest to where I stay). But guess what? When I went to the centre, I was told that they don’t accept cancellation requests there. I would have to go to Koramangala. This was such a huge waste of time.
This amounts to sheer harassment, whether intended or not. This is the worst sort of customer service I have ever experienced from a private company(on second thoughts, most of my experiences with even good ol’ BSNL have been better than this).
Regarding the performance of the connection itself, I didn’t get to use it much. The speed seemed ok. On a couple of occasions, https://google.com wouldn’t open for strange reasons. I would immediately check using an alternate connection(my Airtel ADSL broadband), and it would work. Anyway, with such miserable customer service right in the beginning, I was doubtful if there was any point in continuing. I’ll wait for 3G and see how the prices look. I would prefer to go with a respected player like Airtel – I have been very satisfied with their customer service most of the time. They have pretty solid processes, at least in my opinion. The Tata guys need to learn a whole of things from Airtel.