I am in India for a much awaited vacation and in the past few days have been travelling through India. From Bangalore to Kolkatta, Mumbai, and later in this week, Chennai and then Mangalore. Hopefully will spend some time then in Bangalore to catch up with some friends. Anyway getting back to the post and my experience with personal tech, now by personal tech I mean mobile connection. Lets start with the fact that, since I live in Dubai and have been there for quite a few years now, it would make it difficult to maintain an Indian number. Previously I had bought an Airtel number which at that time had the facility of life time validity, and due to the life time validity there would be no issues regarding non usage over a period of time and I would have the number when I wanted it.

I spoke to the customer service at that time and mentioned to them about me not being in town and so they suggested the life time validity package. As far as I remember it was about 2 years ago, I did give alternate numbers when applying (as everyone does) and that was the end of that. Most Indian cellphone users will know that the Government mandate for cellphones last year requested users to submit information about themselves once again in order to verify the validity of the people using the phone. And all the mobile phone operators complied, Airtel did sometime even more interesting, all numbers that they did not receive the information were recirculated to other people. For some reason my number was blocked and when I traveled to India last month they requested me to provide documents. Which we did, however they did not receive the documents within the 1 week that I was given and the number has been blocked. I was a bit surprised at the action by Airtel and here is why :

1. After informing that the number is not for regular local use, a representative should have called the alternative number, but they did not.
2. They waited for the past year with the number on block and cancelled and recirculated it for a delay of 1 day ? Really, that one day was the limit.
3. They never made an attempt to inform the users whatsoever about the balance (over Rs 1000 ) being expired when they cancelled the number. (Yes Airtel, we know your profits are bad, but that does not mean you steal from the users).

If you are thinking this is what got me annoyed ? well not really. Being a “tolerant” Indian, and realizing that by shouting at people at customer service it would be impossible to resolve this issue, we went into an Airtel outlet (not a regular mobile shop but an Airtel office, on Nandidurg Road in Bangalore) and got a new number.

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I was to travel to Kolkatta, and did not have a number and this new number was my saving grace otherwise making me sort of handicapped without access to communication. We did mention this at the Airtel office, it was Friday and the number was promised to be activated on Saturday. Considering that I would be flying on Monday morning,  I was comfortable with this. But no, Airtel had to make it bad again, the office is supposed to make a call to every user once the phone is activated by the system. Once the verification call is done, they would intimate the main database that the number is verified and the number becomes usable. The call never came, even after specifically mentioning to the person at Airtel that it was imperative that the number has to be made active since I am travelling. Saturday passed without a call, and it was now Sunday.

Reading the website and as per conversation at the person in Nrupatunga Road Airtel office, we knew that they would be working on Sunday until 1:30 PM. So we drove to their office again on Sunday to request them to make an entry into the database. But the office was closed, well before 11:30 AM. Sign, another disappointment with Airtel.

So then I picked a number that was available with a friend, it was BSNL. Now everyone in India knows that BSNL has excellent reach in every town and village in India. Unfortunately they lack networks in cities which are predominantly covered by other players. With this knowledge I know that BSNL would have been my third choice maybe. Well I started using it, unfortunately for me, the roaming partners of BSNL were not good either. In Kolkatta it was CellOne, and in the few days I was there, I never met a single person except me that used CellOne. That perhaps would be an indication of the popularity of the service and the reliability of the service.

Every call to be made or received took at least 3 tries, and one of them definitely was that thee number I was trying to reach did not exist. How I cursed the guys at Airtel for not activating my sim !! Moved to Mumbai then for the next few days and the career of BSNL in Mumbai is Dolphin. Now initially I was skeptical with the coverage as the call drops continued, but eventually the Dolphin service in Mumbai seemed to work. I wanted to get online, and they did not provide me a way to do so. BSNL has an Indian Government service feel to it, tired, slow and unreliable. Cannot really do much.

I was eager to get to Bangalore hoping that my Airtel number would be now activated, well it was on the 21st of May, a full week after I had requested the person at Nandidurg road to activate it asap. Now that the first hurdle was done, came the second one.  I wanted to activate the GPRS and BB services on the Airtel number, well should I tell you it was not an easy task ? You would have figured by now that the inefficiency of the Airtel technical support when calling was very visible. Even after picking support in English the calls were being diverted to Kannada support where the guys struggled to answer my queries although I was now talking in Kannada. When asked about the route to Kannada, the guy at the other side of the phone said I was wrong in my choices. We tried from more than one number to customer service, all the time being connected to Kannada support. At 121 they would refer me to 7070, and at 7070 they would refer back to 121. This went on for about 3 tries at which time I lost patience and shouted at the next guy who answered. Although I knew it was not his fault, he managed to provide me with a national number for the BB services, on requesting if I needed to prefix 0 before the number (all outstation calls from cities need this) he said no.

I tried it without the 0 and the call never left my phone, then I added the 0 to make the call and reach the Delhi (i think) based customer service person who said I just needed to send an SMS. If at all the first person had told me this !! Add to this the annoyance of the IVR (interactive Voice Response) I just grew tired of Airtel. Considering that their profits are dropping, one would imagine they would put focus on customer service to bring back customers, but no they just lost an entire family of Airtel users to Vodafone, all this just because of customer service. A quick search on Google for the keywords “Airtel sucks” yielded over a million results, telling that its not just me. Check it out for yourself here. In fact there is also a Facebook Page dedicated to them here.

All of us in the family have kept the numbers and have ported to Vodafone. Like a newly wed, their customer service seems good for now, donno if I will need to make another change soon though. I used to proudly say that India has so many providers that it is imperative for all providers to have good customer service, but I have been proven wrong. Airtel you need to pull up your socks, else more are going to leave you soon; If you need my real verbal feedback or call me on my now Vodafone number, leave me a message on the blog or at me[at]melvinpereira.com. Your customers of 8 years, now with Vodafone.