I was dining out with a friend when I commented to him that the waiter seemed to be over-doing the whole ‘I am your server, tell me how is your food act’. It was getting annoying to me and I commented to my friend that he doesn’t need to do it. He reminded me of an incident which would make me skip a particular Subway India restaurant and I understood why some places always make it a point that you feel pleasant after going there.

It was new-year’s eve, we were planning on cooking a good dinner for the night and hang out with friends to ring in the new year. So I had skipped breakfast and hoped to catch a quick bite at the Subway in Jayabheri (Near Kothaguda Area). As usual, I got the robotic greeting from the person there. Waited a few mins for my turn, since it was a Saturday morning they were probably short of staff.

I ordered my favourite breakfast sub (which is bread + meat + eggs) and asked the guy there to add veggies (which are an extra 30 bucks or so, INR). anyway so this guy agrees but later on he says his cashier tells him not to allow it and he flatly refuses to add the veggies or for that matter anything to my sub. Now take notices of the fact that this is my favourite sub and I eat it all the time from this outlet as well as from other outlets. I ask for the manager, he points me to the shabby looking cashier , I say manager or owner, he gives me a number which is always switched off. I give up and ask him to finish whatever he had started making.

Now while all this is happening, I casually tell my friend that I will never visit this outlet again. It happens just like that, 1 bad experience ticks off something in your head and you involuntarily decide never to visit a place again. I decided to rely on the other subway outlet near my home that has no problems accepting my requests and whose workers actually listen to me. The owner of that store also responded well to me when I had complained about a certain issue.

That’s the different that good customer service can make to your business, just keep it in mind and instruct your employees to do the needful

I am going to send across this link to the Subway India folks and see if they can take a hint.

1. We departed 15 minutes before scheduled departure time.

2. We landed about 25 minutes before scheduled arrival time.

Check-in : Smooth, barely took 5 minutes, staff was courteous and offered me good seats when I indicated that I was a frequent flier. There was also another person with a portable checking machine, but he skipped me for some reason

Onboard Service :  Very professional, a little too professional ? A little more warmth will go a long way in making passengers feel more comfortable. Also onboard food is too expensive and not really worth the money.

Fares : Somehow Spicejet always manages to get a 1 to 10 rupee upper hand on Indigo prices. Otherwise Indigo is the most economical option on most sectors

So how does it compare to other low cost airlines, in a nutshell :

Indigo vs Kingfisher Airlines : Kingfisher is overhyped, expensive with a very bad CRM, you can see my previous post for more. Their customer care doesn’t even reply to complaints. On the other hand, when I had complained about Indigo’s seating policy last time I flew with them, I got multiple replies. This time the problem seems to have been rectified. I will confirm after my return flight only though

Indigo vs Spicejet : Not much to separate here except the exceptional on time performance of Indigo Airlines vs Spicejet. Last time I took a Spicejet flight at around the same time as this one, it was delayed by over 2 hours.

A rare honour, for this particular experience, I was so delighted to spend more time with my family, I give Indigo a Rating: 5 out of 5 stars , however I will reserve more comments for my return flight.

Update : Got a reply from them that they were investigating the issue and would reply soon, been 13 days since then. Not holding my breath if you know what I mean, big thumbs down to Kingfisher Airlines and its customer care.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Thank you for your correspondence to us. We sincerely apologize for the delay in our response to you.

We acknowledge your concern regarding the recent experience of your mother with Kingfisher Airlines. We would like to share with you that, on receipt of your email an investigation was initiated on the issue; the time taken for the investigation has regrettably delayed our response. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused.

We request you to please allow us some more time and we will revert to you soon.

Best Regards,

<name hidden>

Guest Commitment
Kingfisher Airlines 

My mom had to go to Shimla on an emergency and since Kingfisher was the only Airline operating the flight, we booked their service for a price that would be around 5-6 times the cost of a road ticket , ofcourse that is not the point. The ticket was booked through Ezeego1

As you maybe aware Kingfisher operates all its flights through Terminal 3 at Delhi which is outside the city. That day due to bad weather Kingfisher decided to cancel the flight after keeping the people in dark and delaying the flight for a few hours before cancelling it (to their credit they served a subway sandwich in the wait period). They gave the guest choice to take a refund or re-book for another day or they could arrange road transport. Ofcourse my mom didn’t want 5000 rupees worth of road transport to Shimla, so she opted for the refund.

When my 55 year old mother asked for transport back to the city, she was in for a rude shock. The lady at the counter asked for some time after consulting (with god knows who), she told my mother that since we had booked via a travel agent, she wont be providing her with transport back to the city. What an outrageous excuse ? It would be better if they say they don’t give transport, but to deny that over such a frivolous reason was totally unacceptable, how does it matter when they are cancelling the flight, its not like they will be paying commission to the travel agent for the cancelled flight. Anyway, my mom being a non-violent person did not raise a hue and cry. I am sure had she done that , she would have got a cab for the city instantly.

As a result, my 60 year old dad had to make the long trip to terminal 3 and get my mom. Its still fine at this stage except for te stupid reason given by the lady at the counter. What irked me more was that when I complained about the incident via the Kingfisher website where Vijay Mallya assures you he is taking things personally, I didn’t even get a callback from these guys let alone an apology. So truly un-premium service, served with arrogance.

In contrast, Indigo, Spicejet and Jet Airways all made a point to personally apologise and thank me for any bouquets and brickbats I sent their way.

The purpose of this post is just to let people know that Fly Kingfisher may boast of premium service, but our experience was truly third class with them. Will send across this post to them in an email.

Ordering and Installation : I ordered via the Tata Sky helpline, I paid with my credit card over IVRS, the set top box cost me Rs.3999, 500 rupees less than it would have cost me if I were a new customer. Tata Sky is a move which I consider unfair trade practice has restricted name transfers on Set Top Boxes. That would ensure that people return their set top box to Tata Sky for Rs.300. The engineer who came to install told me that the returned boxes are then used as replacements when someone’s STB goes kaput.

Anyway, 12 hours later I got a call from a Tata Sky engineer wanting to fix an appointment with me. He arrived 30 minutes late for the appointment with a set top box and a dish. He replaced the previous dish because the new STB would need a bigger one. Also since this had a DVR, they would need an additional wire from the Tata Sky dish to our STB.

The carton in all its glory, contains a Set Top Box, Smart Card, HDMI cable, el cheapo batteries, remote and a manual.

Made in Thailand, el cheapo , also notice inflated MRP of 4999.

A view of the backside wiring of Tata Sky Plus HD. This has a FAN

Notice the Ethernet ports and the USB ports, they are marked for future use in the manual. If its future use or TATA Sky couldn’t figure out a use , its anybody’s guess !

After the wiring was done, the installation guys switched on the STB and let the box download the new software, a few calls to the Tata Sky helpline and we were all set, receiving HD channels. For HD channels, Tata Sky charges Rs.50 a month extra on top of your normal package. Its definitely steep, especially for only 6-7 HD channels. Star has the most HD offerings and Star World , Star Movies and Star Plus HD do not have advertisements yet.

Picture quality was as expected much crisper for the HD channels and even non-HD channels improved a lot. I am using a Sony Bravia 40 inch LCD with this box and the difference in non-HD channels was very noticeable.

Above is a snap of the HDMI cable given along with the Tata Sky Plus HD Set Top Box, nothing much to write home about, looking to get a replacement from the United States in hopes of even better signal quality. Anyone knows if gold plated ones are worth it ?

A small overview of the Tata Sky Plus HD remote :

Hope you enjoyed this basic overview of the Tata Sky HD Plus Installation and Ordering process. For more information about features and information about usage and hacks, log onto this IndianTechBlog article.

A special mention for the Tata Sky installation team here, they were thoroughly professional and did their job very very well.

If you want to forward all your emails from your Rediffmail account to any other email account, simply follow the steps below:

1. Go to the classic version of your Rediffmail account. This is important else you will get an error “You have not specified any email address to which you would like your emails forwarded “ You can do this from the new version by clicking "Back to Classic" on the top right corner of the webpage.
2. The browser location will look like http://f1mail.rediff.com/prism/maillist". Replace maillist with forwardyourmails?action=showform
3. Enter the email ID that you want to forward your Rediffmail email to and you are done!

If you follow our blog regularly you would know that we very often bring up the ground realities up to senior management of companies so that they can attend to matters.

This is where the trouble starts :

I couldn’t find any email address for reliance retail nor a feedback form. That is probably THE most shocking thing for a company in the service sector having retail outlets. I couldn’t find a way to contact a senior person in Reliance retail to look at my complaint. As I investigated further I could literally see thousands of complaints people have posted  against Reliance Fresh and other Reliance Retail outlets at generic consumer complaints websites. These vary from overcharging, hoarding, loss of articles kept with security guard to even more serious ones like misbehavior, selling of bad quality (rotten) food items etc.  Even they were victims of the fact that Reliance Retail doesn’t seem to have an easily accessible CRM. A number of people did try and complain via the store root but hit dead ends.

It doesn’t give me particular pleasure to make this post, I am also a shareholder in RIL, albeit only holding a few shares. Just hoping that this post catches the attention of some higher up in Reliance Retail and they come up with a customer relationship solution that’s much better. At this point anything would be better than the no customer care we have.

Do you have a good or bad experience at Reliance Retail (especially Reliance Fresh)  stores to narrate in comments ?

Since then its been a long wait to get KYC certified. Its been around 3.5 months since I had applied for KYC but presently I have been able to hit the status ‘Present in verification’ only. Before this my status was stuck at ‘Present in Process’ for a very very long time. Approximately 2.5 months went by and the status remained ‘Present in Process’.

In the meantime my orders on Mutual Fund sites are being rejected as KYC is failed and its caused some loss to me as I wasn’t able to purchase units while the market was so down. The Indian Govt. is famous for such half baked ideas without any focus on actual implementations for the same.

The disclaimer on the site reads :

This KYC status shall be used exclusively for investment in mutual funds which have appointed CDSL Ventures Limited for centralized KNOW-YOUR-CUSTOMER (KYC) process, & shall not be used or relied upon for any other purposes, including commercial transactions, or more particularly for authenticating the identity of the investor .CVL shall not be liable to any person using this information for any purpose, other than investments in mutual funds.

But the reality is that all Mutual Funds are using this data to check your KYC eligibility and you are doomed if this doesn’t reflect correctly. To check your KYC verified status for investing in mutual funds, access :

http://www.cvlindia.com/inquiry_kyc01.asp

I am dividing this post into 2 parts :

1. Advertisements via phone calls – Airtel has this number 9849805941 which was calling (is still calling) me once a day and plays ads. Since I had registered for DND I contacted Airtel to stop spamming me with ads. Soon Airtel came up with an explanation that this was not a telemarketer number and hence I should complain to the Police if I want these ads to stop, can you imagine that ? They had the audacity to say they want to protect the privacy of this number who makes 1 call to me (and other numbers ? ) every day with ads.

I have also escalated this matter to the nodal officer who is also yet to get back to me, even more suspicious is the fact that I cannot call this number and the line says the number doesn’t exist but still I get one ad from this number everyday.

2. Service messages and Automatic Service subscription – TRAI says that all VAS services need an explicit customer approval to get activated, of course the agents sitting there who want to make Airtel some fast and unethical buck don’t seem to think so. This had happened to me twice in Delhi and twice now in Hyderabad and the modus operandi is even more brazen. After my complaint I got a call from a call center agent who said “these services are activated from back end” , wow, ofcourse he didn’t give that in writing but call record will show he said that. He also claimed his supervisor was not there when I asked to speak to him. When I asked him to tell his supervisor to call me back the supervisor magically re-appeared. Wonder if these call center people are Airtel employees or vendors.

The customer care responses to my mails on the matter are below  (extraneous stuff removed) :

Mail No. 1

With reference to your E-mail dated 08/10/2010, you have expressed concern regarding balance deduction for your Airtel mobile number <snip>.

We realize that this situation must have inconvenienced you.
We would like to inform you that Cricket Alert Service is active and there is a charge of Rs.5/-. Hence, the balance was deducted.
Deactivation of Cricket Alert Service service: 
The Cricket Alert Service has been deactivated with effect from 08/10/2010, as per your request. Confirmation message will be sent on successful deactivation.
Adjustment:
We would like to inform you that the amount of Rs. 5/- has been processed and will be credited on your account within 24 hours.

Mail No. 2 (the same service had again been activated by another agent) – During this period I was on vacation and my phone was switched off so I didn’t realize the balance deduction till I wrote them a mail :

> Thank you for writing to Airtel.
>
> With reference to your e-mail dated 17/11/2010, you have expressed concern
> regarding promotional call and message , deactivate the Value Added service
> for your Airtel mobile number <snip>.
>
> We realize that this situation must have inconvenienced you. However, we
> assure you a prompt action to solve the concern.
>
> We would like to inform you that as per our records there is a charge of Rs.
> 1.50/- deducted for the activation of Cricket Service.
>  
> We would like to inform you that the Cricket Service  has  already been
> deactivated on 03/11/2010.

I am still waiting for my Rs.1.50 refund and stoppage of these advertising calls. I am sick and tired of Airtel’s brazenness now and seriously want to switch over all my connections as soon as number portability comes over. This is also the most serious I have ever been about consumer court, totally aghast at the service dished out by Airtel to me (4-5 year old customer)

I am a part time moderator/web administrator on our unofficial college website. Last year our website had been hacked and some malicious script had been placed on it which was causing redirection of some Google referred traffic. It would not resend all Google referred traffic though, it even placed its own cookie in the malicious script to ensure that people are not sent to the offending site every time but only once every 86400 seconds.

For days I searched the internet desperately to find out if it was a known thing, most sites suggested it was a .htaccess attack, but I had already suspected that and our .htaccess file was squeaky clean. Just to be sure I also checked all the .htaccess files above and below out root level and they were clean. So I was sure it was a script. If your site is hacked via the .htaccess method, there would be entries like :

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://newaddress [R,L]

After the .htaccess files were found clean, I tried some workarounds to prevent the redirection, like setting server referrer variable to null and trying to make all URLs 301 redirects but that didn’t work since the script was still able to detect the referrer as Google and redirect the website to tinyurl4.info which probably paid them a lot to get this done. It would be sent to random addresses on the tinyurl4.info site. Since the site may be hosting malware, I would request you not to go there. So this method of cloaking the referrer at my side clearly wasn’t working.

Next I created a zip file from the offending folder of the site and downloaded the whole thing using my 3G connection photon+ connection (wanted to finish it off ASAP). Once the folder was downloaded, I ran a McAfee scan of the whole thing hoping that the anti virus would be able to detect the offending code as it would be obfuscated. But I was wrong McAfee was terribly incompetent. So it was plan B , I started searching for strings like .js and tinyurl4.info to try and find the redirecting code. Windows search wasn’t very helpful here and couldn’t even find base64 which was one of the strings I searched for and was a part of the offending code.

So now it was plan C , this one worked. I listed all files in the site which had been modified within the past one year. Here is where I was able to find the culprit. One PHP file global_lang.php  had been edited in 2009 while all its peers were not listed. I grew suspicious and opened the file. To my shock, horror and relief I found the following piece of code :

which when translated turned out to be malicious code. I am not displaying the malicious code here should you get any ideas. What it was doing was checking if the person was referred by Google, Yahoo etc. and if that was true and there existed no cookie it would redirect that person after setting a cookie. The cookie ensured that once a person was redirected to the fake site, he wouldn’t be redirected for some time.

I have listed these steps here so that webmasters might be able to get a hint of how to recover from this particular type of  injection on their sites. Ofcourse, always take backups, backups ensure you can just dump them on and the malicious code is removed.

Future Proofing

There is probably no way to protect yourself from the super hackers , however you can always take precautions. First and foremost, always take backups and multiple backups. you should ideally have 12 backups from the past 12 months.

Apart from backups, ensure that the permissions on your website are always set correctly. 777 is really the devil .Never grant write permissions to outside users. 755 for folders and 644 for .php files usually works. Incase you suspect hacking, contact your host at the earliest.

Also turn off all directory listing.

Hoping you found this article helpful

After moving to Bluehost, I experienced downtime the very 2nd day, pretty significant, I got in touch with the Bluehost live chat support (pretty useless most times) who told me (in different words) , This is shared hosting, we cant do anything about downtimes or server issues, please take your issues elsewhere and switch to VPS. I very honestly asked the support person that I am bringing downtime to his notice and he is asking me to shift, suddenly he became soft and told me I had the choice to switch to another host but they wont take care of errant sites on server and neither will they assure me that downtimes would be reduced. It was like downtimes are Ok.

Anyway I kept on with Bluehost as it was overall reliable, then came the next blow : CPU throttling. Its every blog owners nightmare. PHP scripts would routinely be timed out and every time a wordpress page would load, my account would be throttled to ensure their grossly oversold servers are ok. I tried everything, using super cache, cleaning databases, removing overheads etc. But none of these helped. In an experiment, I myself would access a cached age of my account and still find that on each pageload my account is throttled. Page source would confirm a cached page was served. I own small sized blogs and such throttling out was giving me nightmares.

I don’t care what Bluehost tells you but CPU throttling is a deal breaker for me, the site would become excruciatingly slow during access.

Then began the search for the new Cpanel host. Stablehost was suggested by my brother as it had an offer offering 75% lifetime recurring discount. Interesting i said but warned him that if its too good to be true, it sometimes is. So I started to find bad reviews about Stablehost but surprisingly there was no bad review of Stablehost on the Internet, only people praising their personal customer support. I was impressed and those who know me know that customer service should be really good to impress me .

So I have signed up for Stablehost and its been more than a week and haven’t faced a single issue yet, all websites were transferred to the new account and things seem to be running smoothly. However I hope I don’t have to eat my own words. The reason I switched was that unlike other hosts, I can take a 6 month contract, yearly contract etc. for the same rate so switching is easy.

The customer care has been prompt and smooth, maximum time taken to respond was 12 hours for a domain transfer request to be initiated, otherwise I would get a reply within 10 minutes. Such a nice standard of personal customer service is a refreshing change from the robotic customer care of Bluehost who would routinely ask me to cancel my account in case of any downtime and never once reimbursed me for downtime.

Stablehost still has a 50% off coupon running on their website (use BDAY or TOS, both work) and if you are looking for a good, friendly host that offers realistic hosting, please have a look at Stablehost. The 5 GB space 100GB bandwidth plan would barely cost you $36 for the year after the discount. That’s much cheaper than bluehost and other hosts and they dont grossly oversell like Bluehost.

UPDATE: We have used StableHost for about 2 years now. Sadly, as the company has grown bigger, so has its indifference towards users and attitude towards its customers. The shortcoming of Stablehost is that they now recommend their shared hosting only if you have a low traffic site which would require at most 2-3 PHP scripts running a second. They recently implemented a policy (without notice to their existing customers) about restricting maximum (not average) running processes to 10 (down from 20). If your site is just serving static pages, they might be useful but for anything more complex than a low traffic WordPress blog, their admin advises you to look elsewhere.

P.S. : These are affiliate links, but the review is 100% original and not sponsored.