Mar 09, 2016 06:19 PM
43623 Views
The glass panel of my 2011 Panasonic microwave oven's door broke for which I called up their call center in early January of this year. A technician visited after a few days and advised to replace the glass panel. A few more days later, a lady called from the Bangalore service center requesting me to approve the Rs. 3000 estimate for replacing the glass. I readily approved. Surprisingly, she went ahead and closed my complaint with the comment "Customer has not approved the estimate". To confuse matters further, multiple people(from different parts of the country, going by their accented English) were calling from Panasonic's side and asking the same information and asking for approval of the same 3000 Rs. It was a tough time answering so many calls and giving approvals so many times.
Only a few days later, upon following up with the call center, did I come to know that my complaint had been closed. Since then this sequence has been repeated a few times more. Each time a new complaint is registered and each time the service center has quietly closed the complaint. In Feb, in one of the follow up calls to the call center, I was even put on a conference call with the Bangalore service center head. The call center executive and the center head conversed with each other in what sounded like Tamil for a few minutes before they could finally agree on a way forward. I was then promised that the center head would call me with a solution by the same evening, but that did not happen. Only to come to know today that the complaint was closed by him or one of his staff soon after that call.
Also, the strange thing is that I didn't receive any SMS alert whenever they kept closing my complaints.
In short, there are serious gaps in communication and lack of coordination between different customer service centers of Panasonic. Secondly, dragging the customer into conference calls with the local service center may temporarily give a semblance of commitment but when later nothing still works out, the whole gesture reduces to washing own dirty linen in public. Thirdly, closing a call quietly may help the local service center cheat on their performance metrics and targets but it hurts the customer using the company's product. Fourthly, the call center executives even after hearing the long sequence of blunders show the tendency to treat it as a normal complaint and show eagerness to hang up and move on to the next customer call. I had to scream each time to make them transfer to the escalation team.
The joke that is their customer service has come full circle just now:-). While I was typing this, a lady from the Bangalore service center called asking for the purchase bill. Funny because she is now again going back to checking if my 2011 appliance is still in warranty! Looks like she has completely forgotten the details of my complaint, she has forgotten that she had checked all these details very well before conveying the estimate to me back in January! Instead of brushing up the details on this case, it seems she has fallen for the impulse to call up the customer and attempt to put the blame on him! Unfortunate, is all I can say!
