Beware of voice IVR payment. Review on Tata Play

I want to write about a particular bad experience during payment but before that, some basic review on Tata Sky itself,  to which I was subscribing to for around 2 years now.

Though the average quality is ok, following things are recurrently irritating (they might be common for other satellite TVs as well) :- the entire response is very slow : switching channels, using their programs of ACTIV, looking at the alerts etc. Everything takes lot of time. Maybe it has improved in recent boxex or TS+.- there a quite a few onscreen irritants, for e.g, payment reminders or some stupid promotions, spoiling good viewing experience. It shows a big yellow alert which you have to read it by opening and deleting which was painfully slow.- there is some number (VC number ?)with blue background which keeps showing up, that sometimes blocks even remote input. What is the use of DVD quality if you are constantly shown a dark blue patch on the screen.- and of course, the rain. it is very frustrating during rainy season where you can't watch anything in the evening. I'm sure this is a common issue for all dish providers.

But one experience which left me frustrated is their payment mode with atom IVR (or something similar) where you have to type your credit card details and the amount. Me and their call center person were entering the details and one of them was entered wrong but we corrected it but the system seem to have some problem accepting it.

Somehow that person knew that, but he said ok it was paid, he will confirm it later. He never did, also, the credit was not added, stopping the services, So again I called up only to realize that the previous interaction has failed. So I did that again , this time it went thru.

But the issue was next time I got the credit card bill with transactions for both attempts. Then I called the TS again and they claim they received the money only once and ask me to contact the bank. Bank claimed it has paid the money to the merchant.

I had to spent so much time talking to both of their call centers, each time explaining to different ppl. Finally TS registered a complaint to look into it, and after around a week, they found out it has been paid but not reflected in the accounting system and reverted the amount.

Though I was relieved in the end that they were able to resolve the technical glitch, this could have been avoided by their call center for the first time itself, if they acted promptly on the issue or have better infrastructure for payments.

So, be careful when you pay thru IVR, or use other payment methods to be on the safe side.