To Airtel: Express yourself, but don’t overdo it

Oh yes, this is about Airtel and their pathetic service. I’ve been one of the most dissatisfied Airtel customers - without choice - for a long time. The only reason I’m sticking to Airtel is because of my investment, although a low-end one, on the Nokia GSM mobile set. There is no other GSM operator with a service in the region, and that made me a ‘customer’, despite a forced one at that.

Everything started when once, on a very busy day, I was running terribly short on sleep and was woken up by a spam message. Until that point, I used to consider the unwanted smses messages a nuisance and didn’t think too much about them. There was an average of four messages of different variety everyday, ranging from ‘prize questions’ to tone downloads to cricket news to celebrity craps or some really unimaginable junk. When we tried contacting a ‘customer service’ agent to try to stop the spam, we were given a specific ‘sms code’ to be sent to a certain number that would stop the spam. It never worked.

I almost always go for the lowest cost prepaid card (and rarely make use of the full amount) and I pretty much hate smses. Plus, I don't consider carrying a mobile phone as 'cool' either. That essentially means that there were days when I neither had calls nor had smses but the only thing I was doing with the mobile was deleting their spam. One of my irritated friends called up a customer service agent and lambasted him, only to be re-directed back and forth. He ended up talking to some customer service manager for the entire MP region who explained that the smses are sent by default to everyone by a ‘machine’ and there is no way smses can be stopped to specific people. So much for ‘service’!

My first question: why do companies make a default assumption that people like anything that comes to the mobile phone? Even if there *are* people who read all the spam, why do they take it for granted that intruding customers is ok?

Second: How difficult is it to do a customer survey once in a while? There are a hundred customers I know who are only sticking to the service because of lack of choice.

Ironically, one visit to the Airtel customer service website, and the words I notice: over 11 million satisfied customers. Seriously, do they have any idea what they are talking about? I welcome them to take a very small survey in the IIMI campus to start with! In one of our marketing discussions in the classroom, we had to take up Airtel for ‘bad service’.

Sigh! This is exactly why competition can be so beneficial to customers.