Hate to reminisce on my ‘ordeal’ in getting a new connection, but there are a few things which I felt I had to put down in the hope that some Customer Care executive would read n make sense/use of:
- speak to a customer keeping his/her problem history on top of your mind..
This lady I talked to, I let her know my displeasure(a very mild word!) at waiting 9 days to get the pre-paid SIM activated. I ask her to abandon efforts in pre-paid activation(since nothing seems to be happening) and to get it activated in post-paid ASAP (all documentss perfectly submitted previous day) and she tells me “Sir, it will take a maximum of 7 days”! Here I am giving her another chance at keeping a customer in the network and she goes on to tell me the worst-case scenario for activation!
- ’server down’ is never an excuse..prioritize customer requests!
I worked for Reliance Communications and yes, there are lots of times when the server blanks and you can do nothing about it. But we made sure we were there when the servers were up, in the meanwhile we would prioritize the customer requests and make sure we got the serious SLA violations cleared first. In my Airtel ‘ordeal’, either people did not bother to wait for the server, did not bother to acknowledge my request or there were a whole load of chicken execs who did not know how to get my problem solved!
– Follow-up..
I interacted with 7 Customer Care Execs and I believe there was only one Jensy who understood the gravity and solution to the problem. She followed up(with me, the Mobile Store and the execs who came to my company) on the problem for the whole day and no matter what/who/where the block was, at the end of the day I had my activation. She updated me with the progress and I felt there was someone taking care of the problem and somehow I had this feeling my activation was going to be working soon.
All is well that ends well? The ending was not all that brilliant.. My given plan was not the one I opted for! I hate myself for adding to the general Indian attitude of ‘hotha hain, chalthe hain bhai’!
Edited : I did get the plan I opted for – the delayed “Welcome Call” explained it all well.
, never mind how many. An increase of 30% while all the other stocks including the Sensex are in negative! Exide industries will continue to do well(it doubled net profits this quarter!). The others should climb once the Nano catches up and the various versions come out. 
