Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

I have been a Standard Chartered Manhattan Platinum card customer for over an year now, the limit which the bank gave me was Rs.x, x is approximately 1/4 of my monthly in-hand salary. Since I got the card I have been surprised about how they arrived at the limit.

I had 2 other credit cards, one of which I have since surrendered. The limits on those were 2.5x and 10x respectively. Of course I know it’s the bank’s prerogative on assigning me a limit, but sometimes its just so ridiculous that you email the bank and ask for a review. Well the 1st time I emailed them, I was asked to email after six months. And when I emailed them after that , they gave me the same lecture about bank using some process blah blah !

Wow, SC really does something different in calculating the limits. The sadder part is that despite all my efforts, I seem to bump into customer service folks who seem to be inherently stupid, don’t make sense and will write anything to close a ticket. It’s the same copy paste lines, this time I got a reply in record 10 minutes from their second level customer care, this shows no research while responding to customer requests, just respond back with the template you have and close the ticket.

Please note I have impeccable credit history with ZERO defaults ever. Someplace somewhere, Standard Chartered bank’s marketing guys are coming up with awesome products while the customer care department is cutting costs and ensuring that customers don’t stick with the bank.

Why do I still stick with them ?

Well they do have a good product, however the lack of service will I am sure one day force me to severe all ties with them and never return to them ever again.

Can you tell us why their customer service sucks ?

Certainly,

1. I ask them to increase my credit limit via their SR system, no response for days. Then when I email them, I get a mail its not approved. Push them a little more and they say its been raised. Then when I send over my income documents, I don’t hear back for some time, another person now tells me the increase was never approved.

2. I redeemed some rewards which includes bonus Vodafone talk time (don’t take it, it’s a pain to redeem), the vendor doesn’t recharge my phone, I complain to Standard Chartered bank and lo and behold, they ask me to call Vodafone up which is a 4th party to all of this drama. I mean, I cannot even swallow the stupidity of the response.

Ref : xxxx

Dear Mr. Sud,

This is with reference to your e-mail dated July 21, 2012.

As informed earlier, we request you to contact M/s Vodafone directly for further assistance.

We regret any inconvenience caused to you in this regard.

Assuring you of our best services always

Yours sincerely,

Sriram Ps

Officer – Customer Care

And there are more instances, every time I am forced to write to their customer care, I feel like banging my head against the wall.

Advice to Standard Chartered folks : Pull your socks up, there is only so much bullshit a customer would take before leaving your bank.

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:

Just got a job at a MNC in Hyderabad ? Transported or shifted your out of station car to Hyderabad ? Heard horror stories of being stopped by RTO staff and getting your papers and worse, vehicle seized ? Need to pay road tax or get your number transferred.

Well, same was the case with me. If you are planning to use your out of state vehicle for more than a month in AP, then its necessary to pay road tax. The procedure to pay road tax is pretty simple, don’t be put off by horror stories.

I stay in the Gachibowli-hitech city area. Now I have been to three RTA offices, RTA Attapur, RTA, Kondapur and RTA, Khairatabad also. I found the Khairatabad office to be the most hopeless and useless. There is such a huge crowd there and the officials were very busy that they barely have time to answer any questions/queries.

So here is what I did step by step, if you have a NoC and need to get your number transferred then there would be an extra step after paying Road Tax. Before getting the NoC, do find out the RTA name. A NoC in Hyderabad RTA name doesn’t work in Rangareddy District except by going to Khairatabd RTA , a step which you don’t want to take.

1. Head over to Kondapur RTO in your vehicle, as soon as you enter, look around for someone in khaki uniform and tell him you need to pay road tax.

2. He will take you to a room which has space for 2 officers, the officers in my case were very polite. They created a check report for my vehicle and impounded my DL.

3. This check report is what you need alongwith your vehicle RC copy and invoice, head on over to the Attapur RTO

4. Ask the relevant form for road tax payment from one of the shops below, the RTA does not have any form in stock (maybe it’s a way to scam).

5. Fill up most details in the form, rest details would be filled in my the clerk who would calculate the tax needed to be paid. Ensure the vehicle value he takes is correct and does not include road tax already paid in home state.

6. Get the road tax value cross verified from the administrative officers who will double check using the original invoice.

7. Once 7 is done, you would need to get a draft made for the road tax amount and there is another small fee (230 I think) which you can also pay by cash.

8. Once you get your draft goto the same counter, the person there would issue you the coveted green receipt, take a few copies ,keep the original safe and drive around with a copy for the RTA folks on the road.

Since I paid the road tax, I have been stopped twice , the penalty is much more if you bring your car in and pay road tax much later.

So I recently got a car, and like the deal hunting monster I am I started to look at the best credit card for saving money spent on Petrol, The Standard Chartered Super Value Titanium seemed like an awesome card, but alas they didn’t issue me the card, since I also own the Manhattan credit card from them. That’s another story, Standard Chartered bank has awesome product offerings but a pathetic customer care and customer relations team. Will post on that later. My credit limit is around 1/4 of my take home salary and they refuse to increase it.

So yeah, I came across the Citibank Indian Oil Titanium credit card which promises around 2.5% additional cash back apart from fuel surcharge waiver. I investigated into the card a little bit, my city  (Hyderabad) has a number of Indian Oil petrol pumps. So one lazy Sunday morning I went across from 1 petrol pump to another, all in the hopes of finding an Indian Oil petrol pump that has a Citibank Machine. Alas, checking at 4-5 different petrol pumps in a 6km radius, I could find none ?

So I went to the company Indian Oil petrol pump at Madhapur, surely they must have Citibank machine for swiping the card. But even they didn’t have a Citibank machine, they had 3-4 machines on the table, just no Citibank. Why would a company owned and company operated petrol pump not keep a Citibank machine when they are such big partners ? All seems a bit fishy to me. Is it that its just a trick, get people to take the cards but then limit the places where it can be used for maximum benefit ?

My conclusion is that the Indian Oil Citibank co-branded card is kind of a marketing gimmick unless you live near the minority of petrol pumps that are owned by Indian Oil and use a Citibank machine. Unless that is the case, you are better off dumping this overhyped marketing mumbo jumbo driven credit card.

I discovered a list on their website and as expected, only a few pumps seem to carry the Citibank machine and going that far(for me) would use more petrol than the cash back Citibank would give.

Fresh on the heels of the pathetic Kingfisher Airlines experience we had recently, comes an incredibly good experience. I was travelling last weekend from HYD to Delhi and chose Indigo Airlines , mostly for its on time service. So here is the long and short of it :

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: , however I will reserve more comments for my return flight.