Sunday, August 8, 2010

g(rrr..)prs


Addicted to internet as I am, I couldn't bear the thought of not having access to internet during the trip and decided to shell out Rs98 to activate internet on my phone. For this princely sum, I was promised free usage of 100MB per day and an additional charge of 2ps per kb. One problem.. The vendor who recharged my phone did not know the browser settings. I would thus have to contact my service provider i.e Idea and have the following experience.

Call 1: I call up the customer care number and wait for the representative to attend to my problem with some truly irritating and extremely loud music for a solid five minutes but the said rep is MIA. I hang up.

Call 2: I call up the customer care number and wait for the representative to attend to my problem with some truly irritating and extremely loud music AGAIN. Thankfully, the rep attends to my call this time. The line is not very clear and I keep saying, 'Sorry..' and 'Pardon me..' a lot but I finally managed to convey my problem and am told to send a certain message to a certain number. I thank the rep and hang up.

I try sending the message but I'm told that a certain number I had provided in the message is invalid.

Call 3: Irritating and loud music repeats, another rep answers and is told about my problem. The rep transfers the call to someone who is supposedly an expert in what I'm having a problem with. The expert apologizes for the inconvenience and sends the settings through a message.

I try to save the settings but for unknown reasons, it doesn't happen.

Call 4: Call 3 repeats till the part where the call is transferred to the expert. Once again, the line is very bad. The expert, a different one from the last call tries to fix the problem by giving me the settings orally so that I may feed them into my phone by myself. Due to the bad line however, I feel unsure about whether I've managed to understand all the instructions and in the right order and so, end up sounding like a dolt who cannot follow some simple instructions. The dolt thanks the expert and hangs up.

I try to manually feed the settings. It works this time and finally, I can access the internet on my phone.. (..although I'm unable to access certain sites.. That's another story.. Or blog post..)

Although it took just 4 calls to solve my problem and even though the reps and the experts were as helpful and courteous as could be, this harrowing experience felt like it lasted an eternity because of the-

1. Horribly loud and irritating call waiting music.
2. Bad quality of the line. Imagine the impression customers get when the call quality is so bad when calling customer care services.

Suggestions to Idea for improvement- 

  • Please don't subject me to that torturous call waiting music or I will be forced to abandon my preferred service provider of seven years. 
  • Please do improve the quality of calls to customer service.
  • In addition to automatic settings that can simply be saved, (I know that's easier. Hence, the in addition to..) please provide the settings in a separate message that can then be manually applied. 
Is there anything else I can help you with Sir/ Ma'am? In that case, thank you for reading my blog. Have a nice day ;)

2 comments:

  1. Ugh, that all sounds so annoying :/ I have a Verizon Envy3, which allows you to browse the Internet on a limited browser. However, even replying to e-mails on Google is a chore, just because the speed on a cell phone is so slow.

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  2. Yeah, the speeds are pretty disappointing but since it's just for 20 days or so, I guess I can live with it.. My next agenda is to find some software that my beloved told me about which will help me stay within my download limit..

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