Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

If you watch TV these days, you couldn’t have missed the new Flipkart television advertisements. In the ads, children play the role of grownups and praise Flipkart’s awesome service. However one ad caught my eye, because my experience was a complete 180 degrees from what the ad portrayed. Here is the sort of brief, a child (posing as an adult), tells about how he bought something over the weekend and was impatient to receive it. He contacted customer care and they expedited his delivery or so and he got it on Monday morning. Woohoooo ! Flipkart understands his impatience.

Wait, am I blacklisted that my impatience was met with canned responses and no such understanding ultimately leading me to cancel my order ?

I had to goto USA and for the same needed some TSA approved locks which aren’t broken by the TSA during luggage inspection.

Naturally I searched online and since Flipkart had it listed, I ordered. The delivery data ‘just met’ my requirements so I emailed them confirming the delivery date and what followed was a series of canned unhelpful replies and broken promises unlike what the ad shows :

My Email 1 :

Hi,
I am leaving the country on the night of 13th June, could you please get me an accurate estimate of shipping date for this item ?

Their Reply 1 :

Greetings from Flipkart!
Order Id : xxxxxx
Product : VIP, TSA 3-Dial Combination Lock, TSA3DCBLBLK, Black, Safety Lock, Safety Lock & Strap
We would like to inform you that your order for the above mentioned lock is in the process of fulfillment.
The order would be delivered to you by June 13, 2012. Once the order is shipped, you would receive a shipping confirmation email with tracking details. However, we regret to inform you that will not be able to expedite the delivery as the order would be delivered by the above mentioned date.
We request your understanding and kind cooperation in this regard.

My Email 2 or 3 :

Would have appreciated if you actually read my email instead of sending
another copy paste reply identical to previous one.
Please read my last email and respond.

Their Reply :

Greetings from Flipkart!
Order Id : xxxxx
Product : VIP, TSA 3-Dial Combination Lock, TSA3DCBLBLK, Black, Safety Lock, Safety Lock & Strap
Please be informed that the above mentioned product is available with us and we are currently in the process of procuring the same. This is expected to be delivered to you by June 13, 2012.

And their next email totally blew me away by telling me that there would be a delay of 5-6 business days :

Dear Customer,
Greetings from Flipkart!
Product : "VIP TSA 3-Dial Combination Lock (Black)"
This is to notify you that the shipment of the above mentioned product may be delayed by an additional 3-5 business days.
We are doing our best to deliver the order as soon as possible and will keep you informed if there are any further updates.

—-

As you can see, they didn’t understand my impatience <actually genuine need> and probably lied about their stock status to me and didn’t eventually deliver my order in time leading me to cancel.

After this email I cancelled the order and vowed never to trust them on stuff I need urgently. Promptly went to Shopper’s Stop and bought another brand’s lock for a lesser price serendipitously.

Why I Posted this now : Because their ad is misleading and actually creates an impression that they care about customer needs while shipping.procuring. the truth is that they will ship ASAP stuff which is with them in stock but their CS is unable to even respond personally to people asking for delivery date confirmations and in my case the CS gave me wrong commitments which they were unable to keep eventually. They just depend on luck to meet customer impatience in my experience.

Since time immemorial Red Bull has been the unchallenged energy drink in India. A few more players came, Cloud 9 etc. , but never was the launch threatening to its position in the market.

A few days ago, Tzinga contacted me and asked me if I would like to sample their new offerings, being a tech junkie who stays awake coding, I happily accepted the invitation and agreed to try out their energy drinks.

The first thing that hits you when you start looking at Tzinga is the pricing, it isn’t the same super expensive pricing as the Red Bull cans, its pretty cheap, priced at Rs.20 it can easily be a replacement to the Soda Pop you would purchase at the theatres.

The drink comes in 3 flavours with lots of natural ingredients and Ginseng.

It comes in three flavours. I liked Tropical Trip and Mango-Stawberry flavour the best, the mojito flavour of Lemon and Mint was only ok for me. But then your taste may vary

Overall, The drink does give you a good buzz and is an excellent replacement for the expensive energy drink. The low price is like ‘Sone pe suhaga’

Rating:

I was casually doing some idle surfing on the Internet when I remembered a bad incident I had at a Reliance Fresh store, the cashier had deliberately not applied discount for a discounted item and later on much pushing he applied it. Anyway there were 1-2 more instances when I was disappointed by their services so I decided to complain online.

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 ?

So Indian Mutual funds are now required by law to have their customers Know your Customer or KYC for short verified for any amount of investment. Even a Rs. 500 SIP will need you to be KYC verified no matter what. So in December I decided to get KYC verified. To get your KYC verified, you have to fill up the online KYC form along-with PAN card and address proof and submit it to a center for processing these applications

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

This is part 1 of the review : Initial reactions  + Physical features

I have grown up using the Nokia E63 and E71 so when dad lost his E71 (got stolen, no FIR from Delhi Police, deja-vu ? ) , E72 was the natural upgrade for his needs. So he backed off to the Nokia N72 while we searched for a good deal on the Nokia E72. Finally we got the E72 for around $220 from the United States, the phone came with the car navigation attachments which consists of a stand.

Anyway, the background ends here. Moving onto the phone itself. As soon as you hold the phone in your hand, you see it’s a sleeker version of the Nokia E63 and possibly even of the Nokia E71, although it’s a gram heavier than the E71 with the new features built in , it would be injustice to call it a bulkier version of E71.

The phone unlike its earlier version E71 has 2 cameras (one of them 5 MP)  and a much larger internal memory at 250 MB. The dual cameras promise good video calling capabilities and the much needed internal memory upgrade means more good things inside the phone for you. The phone came with a 2GB microSD card.

Physical Upgrades :

Compared to the Nokia E71, the Nokia E72 while having the same shape does have an individual character about it. The keys are changed, the camera is changed and even the unlock key combination is changed. All these changes add to a non-seamless transition from the Nokia E71. My first impression of the E72 was that it unlocks differently than the E71. That itself takes some getting used to. The email key is also precariously placed underneath the right soft-key. I accidentally keep pressing the email key every now and then. On usability these things push the E72 a notch lower than the E71.

But there is a silver lining. Nokia has addressed a long standing demand from the E71 which even the E63 had. The E63 had a flashlight button, the E71 lacked it but with the E72 Nokia has addressed the particular point.

The Nokia E72 has a trackpad instead of a 5 way navigational key. The trackpad is so small that its actually very annoying and prone to mis-clicks and mis-navigation.  The older nav key was definitely better than the new track pad which just gives the phone some novelty but nothing on the usability. Even browsing photos using the trackpad key is difficult as multiple images get swiped many times.

The Nokia E72 also has a standard micro USB port, to tell you the truth I don’t remember what was on the Nokia E71 as I always used it with bluetooth. 

The E72 also has a 3.5mm audio jack as compared to a non standard 2.5mm jack on the Nokia E71. What it essentially means is that you can use your normal headphones with the Nokia E72. The built in earphones aren’t really that great with respect to quality but do the job.

The E72 also has volume keys which allow you to zoom into and out of images. It took me a bing/google search to figure out on how to zoom in and out of images on the Nokia E72.

Apart from this the E72 comes with an accelerometer (I didn’t see where they use it till now). The phone interface doesn’t seem to have been customized for the accelerometer which is a dampener.

The E72 also has GPS which I am surprised to say is extremely accurate and beats the GPS on my windows phone in terms of accuracy (atleast here in Delhi).

The E72 is also supposed to have a proximity sensor and a magnetometer. Will update as soon as I see how to use those. Overall from a physical perspective, the device is a definite upgrade from its poorer cousin but there are still chinks which Nokia need to address.

Stay tuned for the second part of this review, internals.

For those of you who personally know me would know that Shopper’s Stop is one of my favourite shopping destinations primarily during the sale time due to the nice discounts plus the good loyalty program they have : First Citizen. The parking they refund is a super idea in my opinion.

However a lot is left to be desired in terms of store experience and feedback handling by the store. I have felt disappointed with the services rendered in the stores multiple times, each time taking the pain to contact Shopper’s Stop via their online portal but never even in my life did I receive a response from their first level customer service. I will explain why I think the shopping experience there needs to improve.

1. Arrogant sales staff – This happened to me last week, me and dad were shopping at one of the Shopper’s Stop in the NCR area and this guy just kept on hovering over us like a bee over a flower, my dad asked him to excuse him but he was relentless staying there with a sheepish grin on his face, it was only after I sternly told him that I will call him if I need him did he move away.

But this is nothing, recap 3 months in the past, same store. I had recently got a new job (well paying ), so I was looking around in the store for a gift for my parents and the perfume counter caught my eye, I starting checking out the testers for my dad and voila out comes another sales associate with an aim to disturb us. “What can I help you with ?” he quipped with a malicious looking grin on his face. As if I am so dumb that I cant use a perfume bottle.

I felt like Irfan Khan from Mumbai Meri Jaan, like this guy was just there to ensure that I didn’t use the testers of the perfumes. I promptly excused myself and went away from there. I can imagine the associate feeling proud he saved 2 sprays of the tester without realizing his encroachment cost him a sale. In contrast the folks at Pantaloons don’t bother you while you check out the testers. Maybe the staff here is trained like this.

I wrote to shopper’s stop about this incident via their online portal, till date no one has reverted back to me.

Recap a few months before this also, I needed to get my jeans altered, since it was getting late I requested them to send the altered jeans to my home (offered as part of Gold membership to First Citizen). Guess what, “Sir, I will have to talk to my senior about that,” some fake conversations later: “Please collect it after 1 hour from here only.”

2. System not working, salesman disappears with card – I am in another city and mom and dad are out shopping at Shopper’s Stop and they pick out some stuff to purchase. At the billing counter they are told that the first citizen system is not working and neither is their credit card machine. In an instant the sales person disappears with my parents’ credit card to try on another machine. My parents frantically try to locate him, for all we know he could be skimming our card. He reappears five minutes later with the card saying its still not working. My parents dump their purchase there and walk out. I had asked my parents for the executive’s name, and I complained via their online portal. You guessed it right, no response !

3. Customer Care needed, but no response – This one is about when I needed customer care with one of the items I had purchased from their store. I wished to know the procedure for repair etc. Again I wrote via their website and email addresses and got no response. It was only when I got in touch with a senior employee personally that I got a response. It was smoother sailing after that though.

So what is the purpose of this post ?

Its not to defame this store (I infact still visit it once a month), but to bring to the attention of some of the senior folks on what they are doing wrong. Theirs is a publicly listed company and if they don’t even read/respond to customer care emails, it’s a worrying factor. Lets hope we see some change after someone from Shopper’s Stop reads this post.