Indian telecom and
Internet service providers are quite popular for their pathetic
customer service. Mostly due to process issues between their customer
center team and their engineering team where there is no mechanism
for customer representative team to push their back-end teams to
resolve issues or get a reverse feedback of an issue from the
back-end team. But I was recently shocked when a reliance customer
center executive told me that they can't register my complaint. Yes,
you read it right he didn't register my complaint.
Here is how it started. I
logged into to reliance website to pay Internet bill. I don't use any
of reliance telecom product. And hate their website as much as their
any other service. But have to log in every month once to just pay
the bill for my wife. As a regular monthly ceremony, I initiated the
payment from their website. Reliance telecom website uses billdesk
for payment services. So, it directed me to bill desk site. After
first level authentication of credit card number, name, expiry date
and cvv code, it redirected me to my credit card website to enter my
credit card password. After successful payment, I should be
redirected to billdesk site and then automatic re-direction to
reliance website for generating receipt. Instead I got an error which is from billdesk.
I had got text message from
credit card company regarding usage of credit card and I was very
confident that issue had happened between billdesk and reliance website.
This means the amount have been debited from my credit card account.
Being a good appreciator
of self service, once again I logged into reliance website to log a
complain regarding this issue. I shuffled through their various
categories and subcategories and couldn't find any relevant option to
log this complain. I just decided to use one billing category, hoping
that somebody will anyway look at complain. Surprisingly, they allow
only 200 characters. Now, which complaint can be written in just 200
characters especially against Reliance service. Or they might have
been influenced by twitter. If folks can raise their issues with
Airtel_presence there, then why not here too. Nevertheless, cutting
all possibles words that I could cut, I typed the complaint and click
submit. As I should have expected, even logging complaint failed with
an error.
I decided to call their
customer center. Not that I like talking to them but I was left with
no option. I patiently explained the issue to him. He suggested that
I should call the bank. I once again attempted to explain that this
is not really bank issue as issue happened after redirection back
from bank. But he persevere as he might have been trained to. I am
sure anybody who has talked to any of these telecom call center
executive can imagine what I was going through. I actually tried
third time. And when he repeated that I should talk to bank, I asked
him if he can at least log a complain. And he repeated again that I
should talk to bank first. Now, that was frustrating. I repeated –
can you just log a complain? No sir, I can't do it – he replied.
What, why – I exclaimed. Shocked me asked why can he log a ticket.
He replied that he doesn't have option to log this ticket. Are you
kidding – I seriously asked. I had a payment issue at your website
and you can't log a ticket. And he was back to his perseverance that
this is bank issue. I wasn't in for any further argument. I almost
shouted - Can you just give me an email id or phone number where I
can inform this issue. He was agitated too and gave me customer
center email id.
I wrote a mail to this
email id. Somebody called next day and informed that they have
received the payment and replied the same on email. And now I wonder
if something could be resolved on email, then why not the same could
have been resolved through their ticketing system or call center.
Indian telecom and ISP providers really need to work on their
processes.
