Mar 14, 2002 04:07 PM
14951 Views
(Updated Mar 14, 2002 04:10 PM)
I got my Airtel connection a few days back, preffering it over the other existing mobile service provider because it came from the Bharati stable. Yet another reason, I discovered, not to judge a product by it's parentage.
To start with, I booked my connection on the 27th, and got an activated SIM on the 11th. This delay, is something I could live with, but it was just the beginning.
The voice calls appears to work fine (very fine recepion etc.), but the only other service that I tried, SMS, did not. It initially gave me an error message which told me that I needed to ''Check Operator Services'', and moved on telling me that the ''Message was not sent this time'' ... everytime. I did not even bother to try any of their other services eg. voice mail, or e-mails etc.
On complaining to their franchisee where I had got the connection booked, I was told that since Airtel was planning their Punjab expansion at an extremely hectic pace, their office was a complete mess, because of which some problems were bound to crop up - a very sad excuse considering that before their launch Airtel has taken out these huge ads which proclaimed that they were going to connect the whole of Punjab even before they started to launch their services, so that their subscribers did not have any difficulty at all. Although I cannot confirm to have tried this (because of obvious reasons), some friends have been complaining about problems with their international SMSs too.
Another big joke, is their ''Customer Care'' which (pardon the bad pun), is nothing but ''hot air''. After spending more than 2 minutes of my airtime, and going through a series of ''Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Hindi, ...'', on a system which does not accept inputs from a pulse phone (from Bharati, which is proclaiming it wants to ''Make India One'', and wants to set up a nation-wide telephone system), I finally come to a pre-recorded message which informed me that SMS was God's gift to mobile users, and how I simply MUST use it. I gave up.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I always thought that Customer Care meant a live person at the end who would address my problems, and provide me a solution.
There was a small snippet in Financial Express recently, which proclaimed that Airtel had managed to con 30,000 people into subscribing for their services, which, according to the Group chairman, was 10% of the potential in this region. At this degree of service, I don't see this holding. In fact, Airtel might just end up being the first company in the country to have a complete regional mobile phone network, exclusively for their own employees.
