Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

This Issue is  Resolved

Another tale of woeful customer service, this time from Femina , a brand of the Times group (yeah its the same one as Indiatimes , we know you are no longer surprised at the low level of customer service). So here is the long and short of it:

We have a Femina subscription at home, this week the Femina issue is supposed to have a free tube of Lakme Sunscreen. But it wasn’t there in our copy, mom had received it without actually seeing whether the magazine had the free sunscreen or not. Anyway, when I noticed the offer I was shocked to hear from my mom that the magazine’s seal was broken and the sunscreen was already stolen when we received it.

It is not as if we cant afford sunscreen, mom uses a better/equivalent brand already. But the fact is that Lakme probably spent lakhs of shareholder money (I am a shareholder in Unilever and Trent) to promote their new sunscreen. And their target customers never receive the free gift, probably the magazine couriers will be applying the cream (probably another target audience).

Also, most appalling thing in all of this is the attitude of Femina and its so called customer care team. Despite repeated emails I haven’t been able to solicit a single reply from anyone in their organisation (except a cc from their main office which asked the Delhi office to respond). In an earlier incident despite paying for the magazine our copies weren’t coming, even then multiple emails went unanswered after 1 initial reply, this time also the same is looking like the trend. Their customer care system has no tracking and tracing, so its their wish whether they want to answer any email or not.

Poor customers are now pasting their sorrow caused by Femina all over the internet as one consumer complaint page will show. I will be sending this link to their customer care team and any corporate emails I know of, at-least Indiatimes took notice when blogs wrote about their shoddy service, lets see if Femina really cares !

Update

After emailing them again with a copy of this link, got a call from them yesterday, they said that they will send me the gift ASAP. Lets see if that happens, will keep you guys posted. Hopefully their customer care team will be more responsive in the future and adhere to the standards they are supposed to.

ee if Femina really cares !

Update- 2

Got the gift now, also received another call from Femina confirming if i had got it. This issue is resolved.

We share with you the case of one of our readers, Atul, he is being sent from pillar to post by HP India’s service center team at their Kirti Nagar service center (New Delhi) for getting his laptop repaired. Here is his ordeal in his own words :

After getting irritated from HP due to their services I could not help but make people more aware before buying notebooks. The following mail which was sent to HP services manager has been exactly reproduced here to admonish you all against HP. The mail would give you a fair idea about the grievances faced by the customers

Sir,

I submitted my notebook “HP dv 1743″ with “Serial No. : XXXXX” and “Case Id : XXXXXX” approximately a month back. Since then I have observed a very irresponsible behaviour of HP Service Centre (Kirti Nagar). All the people whom I happen to talk to, gave me completely different status of my laptop. Initially optical drive was to be changed which was done after 7-8 days. Then I got 2 different views. According to one, there was a problem with my motherboard “only”, and according to other there was a problem with my bluetooth “only”. Since then I have heard four times that they have received wrong part and it would take them an another week for receiving the right part, which has till now never happened and I anticipate that it is never going to happen.
I have already spent close to Rs. 300 on my phone bills for calling HP and for your kind information except for once I never received any communication from your side regarding the status of my notebook.

I request you to kindly compare your services with your competitors like “DELL” which takes not more than half an hour to even replace the parts like motherboard or anything. I know that you would never be able to emulate them but at least you can fix an upper limit like 7 days or something before which the problem would be rectified. And if you can’t do that, it’s better you shut your service stations and outsource the services.

Will someone from the HP India team please take notice ? If you know someone in HP India , bring this case to their notice.