Aug 15, 2004 03:40 AM
2166 Views
(Updated Aug 15, 2004 03:40 AM)
Hi! I was a user of ''Hughes'' telecom before tata bought it. I will make this long and not-so-sweet story short and sweet ;)
When Hughes(now Tata Indicom) launched their services in Bombay I was very impressed by all their 'fibre optic' non-sense. So my father and I went to their registration booth in our society. At first glance their services seemed good. But I discovered that they were all false promises. I will describe their non-sense in a pointwise form:
Paper work: All the documents/fliers etc...that they showed us were poorly and haphazardly xeroxed work! They didnt show much about their schemes rather than that they showed us how bad MTNL's schemes were, heh, not a very intelligent marketing strategy I guess. We didnt get a single receipt for whatever forms we filled! But we trusted them. Their service was similar to MTNLs except they offered 'free' internet access and some additional facilities like call-forwarding, threeway conferencing,....etc
Actual Service: Quite good. I wont lie here. Their customer support was quick to answer the phone but then they rarely solved my problems. Our friction with their customer support really began after the 2nd month of using their service.
Billing: Like all cellular operators(though our phone was a fixed line) they gave a itemised bill. This bill was 'encrypted' so that only they understood what and how they were charging us. Nevertheless the charges were quite nominal so we paid them.
The real problem started when they tried cheating us. Back then I was just in the 11th (Now I am in Second year Engineering) so I didnt really speak to them directly. It was mostly my mom speaking to them about our billing problems. When we opted for the service we were told and shown a flier which clearly stated that our plan included all the 'extra' services free for the first THREE months. But when we received the bill for the 2nd month we were charged exhorbitantly! All services were charged @ Rs.200-300! This made our bill jump to more than 5K! My mother contacted their billings department and told them about it. But they didnt do much about it.
We told them clearly that we wouldnt be paying any bills until our current bill is corrected. We were told to pay the amount excluding the charges for the extra services. We did as we were told. We even told our neighbour who happened to be an officer in their head office. He took a copy of our bill and a letter from us and told us he would personally look into the matter. But due to some reason he was unable to get it corrected!!!
We waited for the next bill hoping that our matter would be settled but it wasn't! They kept calling us and we kept telling them the samething. We didnt pay their bill for the next 2 months and didnt make a single call from the phone. So naturally we were billed the rental(phone + extra services). Our phone was promptly disconnected at the begining of the third month.
Then one day their ''customercare executive'' (b*llshit call centre trash!) called up and threatened my father! My father is a cool headed person so he listened to her threats calmly. The language she used was literally - ''pay up or else we will...'' (like a gunda or someone ;) ). We didnt do much about it. In a weeks time we received a letter from their head officer or someone. The letter used quite threatening language and it stated that if we didnt pay up they would a ''Initiate Legal action'' (legal action my foot!!!).
My father simply replied to them that rather them them, it would be us who will initiate legal action against them under consumer protection act 1980 and drag their sorry asses to the consumer greviance court and to top it all we would sue them for breach of contract and threatening. This letter was faxed to them. Within two days our phone was back on and their customercare executive was on the line with my mother trying to negotiate. They actually expected us to pay the bills for the time our phone was lying unused and disconnected! We payed them the sum which was our actual usage.
We sent them another letter to discontinue our services immediately. They used all their persuading tactics but we were adamant. They disconnected our phone 3 days after the deadline we had given them to disconnect. They actually had the guts to call us up and ask us to pay the rental for those 3 days!
After a few months a person came to our place telling us that we had to surrender our Tata Indicom instrument. I got very angry at first but looking at that fellow I reminded myself he was just a poor courier guy ;). So I politely told him that we had purchased the instrument so it belonged to us.
After a year or so we received a letter from Tata Indicom saying - ''You are a valued customer. In order to keep our services uptodate we have scheduled an upgrade so our blah blah will be down. Please bare with us!'' I called them up and gave their customer care a good firing! The poor guy was embarrased at their mistake.
Lastly, its my humble request to potential tata-indicom users or the current users of their services should remember that even though the name ''Hughes'' has been changed to ''Tata-Indicom'' the people working in their offices have remained the same. So dont expect a great service from them.
Just hope they dont send you a bill in advance! :)
