Customer Service - What is that ?

After 18 months, for the first time I discovered my Airtel landline was down after I returned from work yesterday. The unexpected downtime sure left me depressed for a while, since it reminded me of those awful days when I had Sify Broadband. (Sify is the most uncultured, unethical, unprofessional company I have ever dealt with. Believe it or not I had a downtime of 90 days once and this great enterprise did not even have the sligtest courtesy to respond, forget apologizing.) Internet has undoubtedly become an inseparable part of my life, so losing him even for a little while, makes me feel the pinch.

So I call up the Airtel Broadband Customer Care on my mobile phone. Again the pessimism in my life leaves me worried that I will now have to listen to A. R. Rehman's composition for an Airtel-ad for the next 10 minutes. But, no! there is a response from an executive within a minute. He quickly runs through a "check-list" of questions. The typical ones - "How do you know it is dead?" "Do you have a parallel line?" "Did you check both the lines?" "What about broadband?". He apologizes for the inconvenience caused and requests me to take down a complaint number. I'm searching for a pen and a pad, when a SMS arrives. There we go, the complaint number had already been sent to me as a SMS. And I'm glad to terminate my indefinite search. The SMS reads that the issue has been reported on 3rd July 7:08 p.m. and will be resolved by 4th July 1:30 p.m. Thats nice, at least they understand QoS (Quality of Service), I appreciate that.

In about 15 minutes, my land-line rings. Woh! how did that happen ? The voice says "Sir, I'm calling from Airtel Broadband and I'm confirming whether your land-line is OK now.". I'm thrilled, I quickly turn on the modem and test my broadband. Voila! it is up and running. I thank him and hang up the phone. Couple of minutes later he arrives at my residence with the service report and to personally confirm if everything is alright. He dials some 4-digit number which reachs the Airtel CustomerCare, describes the problem over phone and the solution and then passes the phone to me. The Customer Care executive checks with me if I'm happy with service and if everything is fine now. I tell him I'm kinda overwhelmed by the turn-around time and couldn't ask for more.

I was really curious to understand how things happened this fast. I ask the guy how did he reach my residence in no time. He tells me that whenever a complaint a registered, the same is immediately messaged to the personnel who is closest to the residence of the complainant. So, he got a SMS the same time I got mine. Peachy!

Mark my words, Bharti Enterprises has a bright future. In a country where no one givs a rat's ass about customer experience these guys are making a difference. Its amazing.

I'm parallelly working with another call center. That is of Dish TV, my DTH billing has been goofed-up in a rather silly way. I have been calling these guys for close to 2 weeks now and nothing has happened. They have 2 toll free numbers (something they recently introduced, else all this while they used to be STD calls to Ghaziabad). Call any of them they redirect you to other. Explain the problem, they readily understand since its an obvious goof-up. They understand and that's it, it stays there. No progress. I wonder how an organization of that scale who has a head-start in a niche space can suck so bad. Why isn't Bharti considering DTH ? An interesting space to be in. Consolidation in home-solutions, thats where the future is.