I use Tata Indicom India’s broad band connection for accessing the Internet. I have been using their service for more than a couple of years and have finally come to the conclusion that I shall not renew my current contract with them when it comes up for renewal in three months’ time.
It has been my experience that at least once, and often twice a month, their service gets disconnected for some reason or the other and I have to go through the agonizing process of first talking to their call center, who give guarantees that are never fulfilled. Let me illustrate my latest experience.
On August 21, 2008 when I tried to access them, I was unable to. I rang up their local engineer who looks after the area where we are located. He said that he would come around and attend to the problem and never did. I lodged a telephone complaint with the company at 8.30 pm and I was assured that the problem will be solved within 24 hours. The next day, the 22nd inst, I tried to contact the engineer without success as either he was switching off his phone or not answering. Much later, in the evening, he finally came on line and assured me that if I called him up after some time, he will be able to guide me to re-set my computer to get access to the Internet. When I called again, he was once again not available. This was after I had once again spoken to the call center where I was assured that my problem would be resolved in just a few hours!
Late at night on the 22nd, I finally got him on the telephone and he said that he was in Sholapur and would return the next day and attend to my problem.
The engineer finally landed up on the 23rd morning and discovered that everything was working alright and suggested that perhaps the router was to blame. He offered to procure a new router and disappeared. Late in the afternoon, he rang me up and asked me to switch on the router and presto, it started working. The problem was with the local distribution center and not with my router. It took them three days to find out this problem and solve it. In the meanwhile, the service center, just acted as post offices do and kept assuring me that my problem will be solved “soon”!
This is not the kind of customer service that I expect from the house of Tatas. I was among those that welcomed Tatas taking over VSNL and expected improvement in their services. I am sad to say that I was wrong.