The Airtel Customer Care Incident

 

Is this multi-million logo rebranding worth more than Customer Care to Airtel ?? [Image Source : Wikipedia

My mom had a few tariff vows with Airtel after her second billing plan pack expired, and she didn’t know about it, and hence I called customer care, and after going through the usual IVR system, pressed the necessary button to talk to a Customer Care Executive, but then was surprised to find this being read out to me, “All calls to the customer care representative will be charged at 50 Paise/3 Min and if you are agreeing with the same press 1 to continue or else press 2 to return to Main menu“. This might be an old news for a significant many Airtel users but for me it was something rather rude on Airtel’s part. So after clarifying the tariff vows of my mom, I asked them about this incident, and they said it was a Govt. rule and so on, sincerely not satisfied with the answer I went online, to TRAI’s website but after searching was unable to find anything supportive, but on the other hand found various pointer to the idea that it should not be charged.

So I make a second call to customer care which goes as given below

Conversation (Only the essence has been retained, the conversation may be slightly different)

Me : Why is Airtel charging me for customer service ?

Airtel : TRAI Guidlines

Me : Which guidlines, can you get me the reference number or the guideline number.

A : TRAI Rules – Telecome Regulatory Authority of India

Me: Yeah but is there somewhere where I can refer this, I mean some guideline number or something.Because CVAS (Caller Value Added Rules) specify that there should be a toll free customer care number to check about CVAS options. In section 2.a.ii of inbound CVAS calls to customer rules.

A : You can call 198 to report any complaints that is still toll-free. (Yet no mention of this in the IVR System). It is there on website you can check, on our website.

Me : Is there any reference number or anything

A : Can you please hold the line for some time, Sir ?

< A 2 minute wait (which cost about Re. 0.33)>

A : Well currently I am unable to retrieve it for you, Sorry Sir . It was there initially, but now I am unable to take it for you.

Me : Well okay so, do you mean to say that you HAVE to charge for this thing.

A : This is a 1-1 customer service, hence we charge for quality.

Me: My question is do you HAVE to charge for this according to government rules ?

A : This is a service , 1-1 service, we provide you information so we charge.

Me : My question is is the charging optional to the company,

A : You will be charged.

Me : My question is, is the charging optional to the company, can the company not charge ?

A : Sorry I am unable to answer your call I will transfer this to my Senior Executive, Please hold the line

< A 50 Paise wait later >

A: Thank you for waiting sir, yes.

Me : I wanted to ask if the charging was optional for the company.

A : Charging is as per TRAI rules, you can see it on our website.

Me : So it is according to TRAI rules and is compulsory ?

A: Yes, TRAI has released regulations, you can check on the site, you will be charged.

Me : My question is whether it is optional for the company, as in can Airtel decide not to charge.

A : I am just one person here, according to company statements, we charge for the Customer Care call, and this is according to the TRAI guidlines. I do not know the rest. I am just one person, my knowledge is limited.

Me : Ok then thank you.

So that is it folks, Airtel is now using slightly painting the rules in a new light, for their advantage.

This is what I feel happened.

Airtel moved it’s complaint registration toll free number to 198. Which was already there but people never used it since Customer Care was information + complaint facility. So you could ask about GPRS pack problems and then ask them for advice on various call tariffs.

Now 121 was merely an information portal, and not a critical factor, and hence a value added service can be made chargeable, which they did.

My problem with all this

1. I don’t think I should be charged to talk to Airtel to get information on Airtel’s services, which will in the end benefit them.
2. If they want to improve quality, they better involve more call centre executives, and not weed out the not-so-important people by charging for this service.
3. In most cases customer service, and customer relations aren’t about money, it is about a implicit trust you have in the company, sadly here it was broken. They may not have broken any rules but twisting them and making them sound as if it is the government’s fault is not the way to go.
4. Nothing is there on the website, as of now or else if it is there, then it is in someway not in an easily findable location. The only mention I got of the whole incident was as follow here

In case you are calling from Airtel mobile, please contact us on 121 for queries like Scheme/Bill Plan/VAS Information ; on our Toll free Customer Care Number 198 for complaints or service requests like Provisioning, Billing & Metering issues, Allocation of Tariff Plan, Account Updation, ISD, STD, Roaming Activation, VAS Deactivation, Service Termination, Security deposit Refund.

Even that doesn’t mention about it being chargeable but reference to the other number as toll free is the give away.

 

The question I have to Airtel are :

1. Why suddenly such a move ? That too at a time of MNP ?
2. Is it to reduce unwanted calls to Customer Care, or to somehow make Airtel more exclusive ?
3. Don’t you think Customer Information is something you need to give for free ?
4. If you could do a multi million dollar re-branding exercise, couldn’t you have invested a bit more in Customer Care Call Centres and improved the facilities ??

So if any of you find any materials, proving it either way please do share as a comment, it might happen even though unlikely that there is a govt. rule like that, and hence I may be wrong.

I have decided one thing for certain, once I get home after my exams, I am going to use MNP to shift  my mom’s connection to someone who cares about Customer Care, and normal people.

Finally let me sign off with a quote by Mahatma Gandhi

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us.We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider of our business. He is part of it.
We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so.

Note : All what has been said above are my personal opinion said after limited research, and in no way should be taken as facts and bearing upon Airtel, this is just my personal incident, and as such may be a stray case. This is not a complaint against Airtel since legally I don’t think they have done anything wrong, but rather a comment on their ethics.

Stop Facebook Spamming

Well for the past 2 weeks Facebook has been filled with spamming messages left right and centre, and since it occured alphabetically and since I am Abhimanyu, I was one of the worst hit not as much as Aakhi, or Aakarsh but still well enough to piss me off. So here is what I think would solve your problem. Please do this if your status message is getting updated unknowingly, and posting on other people’s wall.

The solution is in two parts, the first being the precautionary things you need to do before the actual solution (hopefully it works).

Facebook Privacy

Lock your Facebook

Well it happens to all of us, to some of us in a bad way, and to some in the worst way possible way , there are 3 types of people who you should avoid from your Facebook friend list at all cost, calling them Y-People for short (Short for Y did these People even think of joining Facebook)

1. Family
2. Faculty
3. Manager/Boss

What people fail to realise is that Facebook is a “Virtual You” and is pretty much alive, and byting. We the normal people in our real lives have multiples faces, one to be cool, one to be responsible, one to be romantic and so on. But in Facebook all these persons blend into one single profile, and hence the problem starts.

Justify your posts in WordPress

There are a few people (including me) who like their text to be justified in WordPress, sadly WordPress visual editor only allows Left, Centre and Right alignment. In my opinion

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam sollicitudin ornare lorem ornare placerat. Vestibulum dapibus quam id enim rutrum fermentum in ut metus. Donec blandit ante luctus turpis bibendum laoreet luctus magna posuere. Donec erat lorem, congue eu posuere eget, volutpat blandit magna. Duis ipsum sapien, ullamcorper at elementum non, ornare id justo. Maecenas sapien massa, pretium eu gravida at, varius ac est. Suspendisse et ipsum lorem, ut mattis dui. Donec volutpat massa ac ante congue lobortis. Ut scelerisque tincidunt iaculis.

looks a bit akward, now that we are used to justified alignment in publications and  our documents. There is a group who feel justified alignment sucks big time, but as is the saying there in no harm in knowing how to do it

iPhone 4, In So Many Ways, It is Overhyped !

On the 7th of June, at the WWDC, at an event which even God^[1] is rumored to have watched Steve Jobs in his turtle neck t-shirt announced to audience both on site and online  the next huge leap since iPhone itself, iPhone 4. It was the fourth edition of arguably one of the best smart phones on the planet, and according to Mr.Steve, it has just got better, but as happens with any product launches, the fine print always gets ignored.

Apple is a company which I believe has the best marketing team in the world. Their idea is simple create something good, and now instead of convincing you that the product is “really really good”, they convince you that you “really, really need it”, and thus their products shift from a luxury to a necessity and the end verdict – ”Apple is now the largest tech company in the world and makes more profits just on iPhones than Nokia makes on its entire global mobile market”.

Now if you think this blog is against iPhone 4 : “You are WRONG” , it is one of the most brilliant and smart piece of gadget, I have seen (on computer). This phone also vouches for my opinion that “Apple has class”. Now with Apple, a company so good at giving its products a hype like crazy, even iPhone4 has been hyped to the point of no return. So the obvious forgetting of the fine print. Now we go into the main features (functional and design) listed on official webpage and show you the fine print that Apple just forgot to highlight. Apple, just like most corporates don’t lie, they just say selective truths.

A new look at a piracy free world

Microsoft as usual is still continuing to fight it’s battle against Piracy, which they say is a crime. But I have a feeling that making the software world free of priracy might be like Terminator, as in working towards a goal that finally kills you.

Linux had been predicted to overtake and pin down Windows, with the slight problem that this was supposed to happen a decade ago, and even though Linux has got better, they are not close enough even now. They may overtake Windows in the future but not quite that soon. But this prediction has done it’s share of good more actually for Windows users, Microsoft accepted fact that there are other OSes and started putting more effort into their products to make it usable and started to develop better products so that people will buy them. The reason Windows is still supreme is mainly the immense software market out there for Windows, and more importantly the fact that most people believe that Windows = OS, they just don’t want to change something they are really good at. So anything different from Windows is doing it the wrong way.

Add Code Bits in your WordPress Blog

If you have your own tech blog and use wordpress, generally all the newbies will face this same problem, how to add code bits to your own blog when you try to add them generally what happens is that they will appear with paragraph line spacing, this looks good when you write normal paragraphs but with computer code it looks weird like this

ConnectionConfiguration connConfig = 

newConnectionConfiguration(“talk.google.com”,5222, “gmail.com”);

XMPPConnection connection = new XMPPConnection(connConfig);

connection.connect();

connection.login(“blahblah@gmail.com”, “password”);

Chat chat = connection.getChatManager().createChat(“friend@gmail.com”, null);

chat.sendMessage(“Hi Tom!”);

}

Software Patents :- It Kills Softwares

Everything that happens, happens for a reason, and today I might have just found one good reason to be happy about legal litigations taking so much of time – “Software Patents”.

Patents were started as a way to protect and encourage the original ideas of an inventor, a patent allows the inventor to safeguard his “product” from others set to steal his thunder. It vested the inventor with the full rights of the “product”, he could now market it on his own, or sell it off at a price or collect royalty according to his wish from the companies that wished to use or sell his product. All this was never done to actually benefit the inventor alone, it had a larger picture to it. Everyone thought that encouraging inventors will result in more inventions and that will take technology forward and as the end result take the society forward. This end result of patents has been highly debated upon, many a times patents have been called as a hindrance to true progress, but with “Software Patents” this whole debate is taken to an entirely new level.