Clueless Customer Service. Review on Airtel Mobile Operator

I have been an Airtelcustomer in Bangalore for about 2 years. While there are intermittent ''network busy'' issues, by and large I am satisfied with the coverage and quality of signal. However, my interactions with their Customer Service have been disappointing. By and large they seem clueless.

Recently, I tried to activate GPRS on my account since my new Sony Ericsson K700i supports this feature. Here is a step-by-step report.

Call 1:

Called Customer Care and said I want to activate GPRS. They told me to send an SMS of a specific text string to a number and it will automatically activate. I did this and got a response ''Contact Airtel...''

Call 2:

They told me that I should go to an Airtel location (any) to get GPRS activated as I have to sign a form.

Call 3:

I went to Airtel location where I bought my SIM and service and they told me that I have to go to Bannerghatta Road office only.

Call 4:

I called Airtel again and they told me to go to the Brigade Road showroom and it will be taken care of.

Call 5:

I went to Brigade Road showroom and had to wait about 20 minutes since they were closed for lunch!! Anyways, after they reopened, I was told CURTLY that I had to go to Bannerghatta Road office since I was a post-paid customer. When I protested that I was told to come here and asked that they call their customer service, they went ahead and followed a sequence of instructions from some manual and sent this via SMS to Airtel. Sure enough, I got a response that my GPRS will be activated in a few days.

All this took about 8-9 days!! I got an SMS response saying that my GPRS was activated the next day but nobody told me what I should do with it and how I should configure it. So, I called again.

Call 6:

I was told that they will send me my ''settings'' via SMS and I can save it on my phone. I received 4 SMS messages and got Airtel Online, Airtel Masala, MMS and Mobile Service set on my phone. I tried to connect to a test site and got a message ''connection failed''.

Calls 7,8,9:

I have called Airtel three consecutive days and every time I get a new person online who give me the same dumb service. They read out the manual configurations to me and I verify that my APN, Username, Password, IP etc. is set properly and then it does not work. I get the standard message ''maybe service is down sir, try later''.

Anyways, it has been exactly 2 weeks since I got my GPRS activated and have still been unable to use it. I know I am being charged Rs. 600/month to use it. Taking into account the 15 hours that I have spent trying to get it working, I have spent some Rs. 5000.00 on it so far and no luck.

Airtel Service knows how to handle account info but has ZERO technical knowledge.

Adding this on August 9th

After four more visits to Airtel Customer Service, I realize that there is EXACTLY one guy who knows how to configure GPRS in Airtel Bangalore. His name is Shashi. I managed to hook up with him (had to drive to Bannerghatta Road office) and he got me configured in 10 minutes. Please contact me if you need help with GPRS configuration.