Airtel - Service Extraordinaire
In India, one is accustomed to delays and false promises of punctuality, but one does not expect that from Airtel. While I was offline, I typed out a little complaint against Airtel for their horrible service, for their pathetic promises and for the fact that they play stupid advertisements while putting you on hold unless you tell them specifically to cut out that crap.
To be fair to the customer service reps, though, there was some movement on the day after I told them that I wanted to speak to one of them in person and get a written assurance of the time needed. The cable guy landed up and connected us to the line. Two days after that, there was some more trouble when they pretended they didn’t have a wireless router (We’d paid for one already). My dad gave that guy a shelling and told him to go get a router from Richie Street or return the money. A little more yelling and some tech landed up at the house at eight. He struggled for a little time, changing routers and stuff, and I was confident that he was going to go away saying, “Saar, line-la problem irruku, saar” so I was rather surprised when he said, “There’s some problem at the exchange.”. No wait, I wasn’t surprised. The surprised part came when he said it would be ready in 15 minutes and actually had it done in that time.
Total time: 8 days. Promised time: 4 days. Standard Promised Time: 7 days. Any way you look at it you lose, Airtel. You lied. Sure, I have internet now, but your service was abysmal, your sales reps are stupid and your customer service reps lie. I have half a mind to put that Vijay’s (sales rep) number up here so that random people can sign him up to SMS advertising.
Ah ha, so it’s not just me. Chetan had a near identical experience.
Posted by roshan.george under Internet, Madras, Tech |
Thats weird. They usually get things done super fast.
The guy I had come to my house to fix up the connection was Govindarajan but he left me Vijay’s number in case I had a problem. I guess I was better off with Govindarajan.
Comment by Chetan — September 2, 2007 @ 11:14 pm
Usually. Hmmm, I’m getting to dislike them more and more. Last night, my connection failed. Today, the rep landed up here right on time (that was nice), and then told me that the router they gave us has to be restarted once in 3 days.
Once in 3 days?!! What are they, crazy? Why didn’t they say this in the beginning? I would have just gone and got a good old Linksys WRT54, it’s only 300 more than what they gave us and it’s got two antennae.
Comment by roshan.george — September 3, 2007 @ 1:50 pm
Interesting ! and dude.. please convert the file format to Word doc, or even better, pdf. Many people around don’t have OpenOffice
Comment by Arun M — September 3, 2007 @ 5:07 pm
How does two antennae help?
George, you and Fog Dude seem to be the only ones getting bad Airtel service.
Ragha, Adithya and me all got our connections in three days with all formalities.
And the Airtel techs do know their stuff.
Just be thankful you didn’t get BSNL DataOne. You have to give them a written letter (to their head office) and then wait a month for a response.
Airtel plan change involves sending them your customer id and plan wanted to their email address. BSNL? Write letter and submit and wait for one month.
Comment by Marc — September 3, 2007 @ 9:13 pm
Arun M, .odt is the ISO standard for documents.
Deal with it!
Comment by Marc — September 3, 2007 @ 9:19 pm
And they’ve given me a complaint number pretty much every time. Guess valued customers get better treatment.
Comment by Marc — September 3, 2007 @ 9:44 pm
George, just out of curiosity, have you moved into Gandhi nagar?
Comment by Arun — September 3, 2007 @ 10:11 pm
Arun: Here’s the HTML version. You dare ask for .doc?! Bad boy!
Marc: Two antennae look cool, like kitten ears :)
I seem to be having bad luck. I wonder why.
I had to ask particularly for a customer number. Weird.
Arun: Yeah, I got the connection after I moved. I’m on 3rd Main Road.
Comment by roshan.george — September 3, 2007 @ 11:01 pm
Living close to school. Nerd.
Comment by Marc — September 4, 2007 @ 12:22 pm
:D Brilliant reasoning!
Comment by roshan.george — September 4, 2007 @ 12:47 pm
I knew it! Welcome to the neighbourhood! Be prepared to experience Airtel’s most crappiest services in town here in Gandhinagar.
Comment by Arun — September 4, 2007 @ 10:23 pm
I wonder why we get it like that. It’s not fair. It must be because we stay near Michael’s.
Comment by roshan.george — September 4, 2007 @ 10:42 pm
Brilliant reasoning.
Comment by Marc — September 5, 2007 @ 5:43 pm
Copycat!
Comment by roshan.george — September 5, 2007 @ 6:08 pm
Who? What?
Comment by Marc — September 5, 2007 @ 10:43 pm
Just like that, you know.
Comment by roshan.george — September 6, 2007 @ 1:00 am
I have taught you well.
Comment by Marc — September 6, 2007 @ 11:08 am
:D Copycat, stole my line!
Comment by roshan.george — September 6, 2007 @ 12:21 pm
You started it.
Comment by Marc — September 6, 2007 @ 5:31 pm
Waaaahhhh!! :(
Comment by roshan.george — September 6, 2007 @ 6:16 pm
[...] Looks like this isn’t a one-off occurrence. George had a similar experience: Airtel - Service extraordinaire [...]
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