Airtel Customer service – What a joke (and you pay for it @50p per 3 mint :D)

By On · 2 Comments

I lost my cellphone on 12th Sep, 2010 and asked the customer service (121 and 9810012345) to disconnect the present SIM and issue me a new SIM. The CSR (customer service representative) promised me that new SIM CARD will be delivered at my billing address within next 24 hours. I kept waiting for next 2 days and on 15th afternoon at around 2.30 pm, the CSR told me that they had send the SIM on 13th September but there was no one at my home to collect which was a completely  false statement. My both parents were at home and I was sure they were lying. First, I gave them a piece of my mind and confronted them saying this is all wrong and no one from Airtel visited my place. I don’t remember when I had lost my temper like this in past. This is absolutely not acceptable. You just because of your position and poor customer protection Laws, can treat people like this. They said now they can’t help as this is in their record and If i request again they will take 72 working hours to deliver the SIM (Yes that means 9 working days).

I said this it not accepted as i need the sim today,on which they transferred the call to some customer retention department where the guy who picked up the phone said it will take at least 3 working days to deliver or if i want i can raise the request to cancel the connection.

I decided to take his advice and brake this wonderful (wondering what else to write)  3 year old relationship with Airtel. I am planning to buy some other connection tomorrow which I am sure will get activated in one single day.

Thanks Airtel to again proving that there is nothing called customer service in India.

Now I will buy a prepaid connection as I think no service provider is worth trusting.

Note: The best part – if you dial on my cell no it still rings.. so they  (Read Airtel Customer service) have not even disconnected the services. Hope someone is not making international calls at the end i might have to pay for it.


Putting The Relationship Back in Public Relations

By On · 2 Comments

We all know (PR prof’s) that there are 4 important steps for pulling up a successful PR campaign.

  1. Research
  2. Strategic Planning
  3. Implementation
  4. Evaluation

In the traditional Public relations, the success is evaluated on the basis of impressions.

I strongly believe that public relations as a discipline and an integrated department, should own the responsibility of social media across the spectrum of enterprise, products and solutions. I don’t think social media should be crammed into a silo with PR and forgotten about, but rather, employed across the organization with PR owning the responsibility of managing its implementation and internal education.

If one tries to compare an apple to an apple, public relations prevails over marketing, IT, HR and Executive Management when it comes to owning the responsibility for web strategy related to blogging, podcasting or RSS; social search; social networking; micro blogging and, to a lesser extent, web content management.

This is because “Public relation’s aim is to establish and promot a favourable relationship with the public for an organisation, brand, product or cause”. And this is exactly what one wants to achieve through social media – engaging and building relationships with key audience and general public at large.

In some agencies where the management  has understood this role (opportunity) and is asking the PR professionals to take charge of website content (a little intimidating for most PR folks), including management and engagement on social networks like twitter, Facebook (frightening), and  blogging/podcasting and are a close second in being responsible for SEO (you must be kidding!!!)

We all know that industry has changed. Now, more than ever, it is imperative to know that we are digital. We are connected, we are more social and we have more technology at our disposal than ever before. The society is local and more global at the same time, there is a different level of interconnectivity among organizations and individuals. I am in no ways suggesting that the old methods and mediums are redundant. We still need to understand media relations, crisis communications, event management and all the other sub-topics of PR. But all of them have taken on different environs in today’s world and we need to bridge that gap and learn some new stuff and unlearn some old methods.

Hope most of you guys will agree.

Please feel free to comment on the article. Criticisms are welcome!

Happy Reading

M


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