Airtel Customer Service

I thought they were Gods, until yesterday.

I was subscribed to their weekly GPRS Mobile Office Plan, which gave unlimited GPRS and costed 140 Rs. a week. Not particularly cheap, but I like to have unlimited data plans. So, I happily went ahead with that. Until one day, I got a call from somebody at Airtel. They had a plan called 249 Blackberry with Unlimited MO. This was essentially a plan for blackberry, which had unlimited GPRS along with it. Use of blackberry would charged at 15p or so per kb, but GPRS had no extra charge. Wonderful. Substantial amount of savings per month. I didn’t have to use blackberry. I will use just the GPRS. It was fine – I was told. Okay, so I have to send an e-mail to subscribe to that plan, which I did and I promptly received a confirmatory message that this plan has been activated.

Like an alert customer I called up there customer care centre and confirmed that this new plan was activated and at the same time the old weekly one was deactivated. I was told that was the case. Great! When they sent me a message afterwards asking if I was satisfied with the interaction, I even replied saying yes. And then came thursday – the day my weekly plan used to be renewed and I received an SMS saying it has been renewed. What the hell! It was not supposed to be active any longer. I call up the customer care again and the friendly representative tells me that I need to send an SMS to cancel the plan. Why the hell did the earlier one not tell me so. Anyway, I send the message. 24 hours later I get the confirmation that the plan has been canceled. Great! Only problem is I am no longer able to use GPRS. Whatever happened to my new plan. And then started the series of calls to three departments at Airtel. One at 121 (the normal customer care), other at 7070 (the blackberry department) and yet another at 12118 (GPRS technical support). I am not exaggerating, but they kept asking me to call the other number, when I called on one of them. Finally I got frustrated and asked one of the representatives to escalate the call. She assured me that she is filing complaints and it would be resolved by 12. Great! Guess what! After that I get SMS telling me the complaint reference number. Not one, but four of them. But nothing happened until 4 in the evening. So, I call up again and give one of those reference numbers. Apparently there is no complaint filed under that reference number. Wow! I ask again to escalate the call. She tells me she will file the complaint. I kept insisting on call escalation and this is the only thing she can do, she kept telling me. Finally I lost the patience and agreed to her complaint filing. I again got two reference numbers and the ETD? Well – for a complaint filed on friday, it is 5 pm on monday. So, here I am without GPRS connection, but paying for both the connections probably.

Sigh! Airtel – I always thought better of you.