Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

This is the first time I am this angry with Airtel, I have used this mobile service all my life but the blatant disregard for the customer is appalling to say the least. I am forced to write this mail as they are refusing to respond to my emails and are not resolving my complaint. In fact today I received a SMS that my query has been replied to and in truth it hadn’t been replied to. Some call center supervisor on a power trip. No response to any follow-up emails either. Just to make it clear I used strong language in my mails but no insults or profanities.

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)

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.

Bluehost had been my first ever commercial host and my experience has been well, mediocre. I wont call it a bad experience , neither would I say that it was a Bluehost nightmare. This is the most honest Bluehost review you will ever get from someone who was on Bluehost for around 2 years and had quite a few low and high traffic domains hosted with Bluehost. Being an Indian one is more likely to end up with shady hosts, but since my domains were doing pretty well I decided to go to Bluehost for stability and the price and reputation was good.

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.

Just a short little post to warn you about Big Bazaar and some of their offers, my parents got duped twice by the same outlet (Big Bazaar Vasant Kunj) on the same item. The first time they were quick to raise a fuss and got compensation (a voucher to spend on same store within 15 days, yeah that’s what they offer for overcharging).

The second time they drove to that place to get the 1st voucher redeemed and unfortunately they were in a hurry and didn’t look at the bill receipt properly. So here was this item marked ‘buy 2 get 1 free’ everyone on the aisles and my parents didn’t get the offer. The funny bit is that its the same brand that they had been cheated on a fortnight ago in exactly the same fashion. The customer care had tried to fool them into accepting the flawed bill, but Mom and Dad have learnt from me on handling these shrewd business people and were able to get a refund in the form of a credit note. Impressive but if I were there I would have pushed for a cash refund.

Anyway, instead of driving to Big Bazaar again and going through the painstaking exercise of explaining to them again, I decided to write to them an email and asked for a refund for the extra money my parents spent. And here’s the shocker :

For the first time in my life, writing to the Future Group has failed to even evoke a response, I have used that email ID for complaining against everyone from Furniture Bazaar to Food Bazaar to Big Bazaar, but this is the absolute first time the Future Group has completely ignored my complaint. No follow-up, no apologies and no compensation. Seems like the customer complaints against them are turning out to be genuine. Hope they recover soon and go back to being the customer friendly organisation they are supposed to be. About me ? I am poorer by Rs.60, but all is well

It has been 2 years and 3 months since I had bought my Dell Inspiron 1525 Laptop. Mine was one of the last batches to have been made in Malaysia with most of the assembling shifting to Bangalore later on for Indian customers. I was lucky as my original laptop was pretty robust, but one thing you notice with DELL is their lack of concern for quality in various parts.

Almost everyone in my class owns a DELL and has had to invoke the warranty atleast twice. Which brings me to a good point DELL India’s warranty is probably the only thing worth writing home about. Seriously good warranty and replacement of parts once you get past the call center. That’s why I always made an online complaint whenever I needed to invoke the warranty, no need to speak to Indian call center agents who talk to you as if each replacement part is being cut out of their salary. But this post isn’t about that, its about my ownership experience with the DELL Inspiron 1525 where it fell short and where it did good.

The Good

The laptop itself is the good thing, its working alright and all of the insides work perfectly. Its easy to clean and the RAM is pretty easy to upgrade. And that’s about it.

The Bad

Extremely pathetic plastic quality. The keyboard keys are fragile (tab broke, had to be fixed with fevikwik),one of the touchpad buttons is faulty, the palm-rest plastic is discoloured and the hinges are loose. The adaptor wire seems like its ready to break off and the power button is also losing its coating of chromium (?). But to be honest, all these things were changed in warranty except the button,adaptor and hinges. The palmrest had been broken by a Dell employee in a service visit. The keyboard had stopped working twice. The replacement parts seem to be of cheaper quality than the originals which is a very worrying prospect.

The battery is by far the worst thing in the laptop and worst of all warranty customer care wont cover it. It used to give only 3.5 hours when new and now barely gives 45 minutes on battery saver mode. Its still better than one of my friend’s Inspiron 1520, after 2 years his battery stopped all backup altogether. On the contrary one of my friends’ laptop from Dubai still gives 3 hours after 1.5 years of usage. Not sure if they get a better battery in Dubai shops.

The Ugly

Well nothing really ugly about it, its just that the manufacturing is done keeping in mind to have a low period of ownership. The only ugly i see is that 1.5 years into ownership the mic stopped working and to replace it I probably need to replace the motherboard.

Would I buy a DELL again ?

Yes, but not from India. This was my first experience with DELL India and I am now a wiser man , I would much rather wait for a relative from the US and have a better quality of laptop construction and parts. I have a DELL US laptop (Vostro) and also a Lenovo US laptop and their quality seems to be much better than the India counterpart without a need to invoke any warranty even.

Incident 1:

I am really angry at Airtel right now, it all started 3 weeks ago when I decided to open Airtel Live after a span of around 4 years. I saw a link for some yoga thing, thinking that it was some application for yoga I decided to check it out. On the next page I figured out it was just a way to sell photos so I quit Airtel Live then and there. The thing to remember is the page where I quit was a portal page with links to content. I had not downloaded any content, nor was info about charges relayed to me.

After about an hour I saw that Rs.10 had been deducted from my balance and I have been subscribed to ‘celebyoga’ service. Angry that I never subscribed to the service and that the charge information wasn’t relayed to me, I called up Airtel and asked them to refund my money. The CC executive refunded my money immediately. I decided to pursue the matter and asked Airtel for how the consent for the service was obtained by me. I got a stupid copy paste reply :

We would like to assure you that just like a call gets captured only after it originates from a mobile and gets connected to the called number, similarly, the download made you gets captured only if you click on the content, which is then charged accordingly.

After exchanging 4-5 mails I was fed up and stopped pursuing the matter thinking that I didn’t lose anything. The service was deactivated after 3-4 days and repeated reminders.

Incident 2:

Then on 6th April it happened again. While driving I got a message that I have subscribed to bollywood services, I am like What the Hell (atleast they should have made it Hollywood to suit my taste). The strange thing this time was that I had NOT even opened Airtel Live.

I got my money back again but Airtel still insists I clicked on the content which is preposterous since I had deleted the Airtel Live settings after incident number 1.

They say it might have happened without my consent, strange again since I never give my phone to anyone.  I got the same reply as above and they claim they have investigated the issue. (and sent the same copy paste reply). The existence of such a copy past reply actually proves that this is happening very often that they had to make a FAQ for it.

Since they refuse to accept that I never clicked on the content its really hard for them to trace the people causing this illegal activity. Hopefully it wont happen again to my phone. I can imagine some agent sitting somewhere and randomly subscribing people to services, the sad part being that some must be gullible enough not to confront Airtel on this.

Anyway I got a followup call again with the operator insisting that I had infact subscribed to their services, I gave him a piece of my mind and he promptly retreated. I have been asking them for records of taking my consent but I haven’t been able to get a proper reply.