Airtel Customer Service – Leased Line – A Letter to Sunil Mittal

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Sunil Bharti Mittal,  Chariman, Airtel

Dear Sunil,

We are a distressed Airtel Customer. We pay approximately Rs. 300,000 per annum for Leased Line Connectivity. This is not a Broad band customer complaining, and your sales folks have walked into the office several times to earn our leased line business. However, I clearly do not see the quality in Customer Support after Sale. In the last 30 days the Internet has been down over 3 times. December 3, 2015 to  December 7, 2015 (understandable, because of the floods)   December 11, 2015 & December 26 – December 28, 2016

I understand that as a business you have technical issues. We can relate to it. However, what is alarming is the behavior and attitude of your customer support personnel when there is an issue. There is clear lack of communication. Every time the network is down, the customer support is bad. They do not want to take ownership or talk to the customer. This time it was worse and it made me write this letter to bring this to your notice. (also 95% of the time the assigned folks from Airtel are not reachable when there is an issue)

Let me walk you through a recent example. The internet was down on Saturday, December 26, 2015.  We called your Service Engineer and also messaged him. He did not pick up / nor did he return the messages.  We also immediately raised a ticket “SR Creation Time = 26-DEC-2015 10:59:17, SR Number=19304241”.

We called another personnel (the # provided to us) and also messaged him. He was kind enough to let us know that he was no longer with Airtel and provided another contact. Talking to the new contact, he was not willing to assist.

We called up Customer Care again (waiting on your customer care line is a pain) and were pleasantly surprised when we were informed that we have a new account manager.  This was never intimated to us through the process of our relationship. Account Managers need to meet their clients and take care of their accounts. This never happened. However, we contacted our new account manager and also sent him a message. He never responded.

On Sunday, December 27, – more or less, the same kind of responses occurred from your customer support  (in a different fashion). However, we still had no luck and our issues were not resolved. The agony was, we were asked to repeat the same information over and over again in spite of having a ticket #. (I would assume you would have good systems in place).

Monday, December 28 – We called our Service Engineer again, he picked up and asked us to talk to the Customer Support team (they were located somewhere in Gurgaon) . The support customer personal this time provided phone numbers of 2 new account managers (called them 6-7 times and no response) , asked us to call GGN Shift Manager (Do not know what GGN is) and were waiting in line for over 10 minutes.  We then spoke to an escalation manager and he was to call us back in an hour and that never happened.

This was getting out of our hands and we called the Service Engineer and was asked to go over the whole process again (providing MUX #/ etc). The link was finally up on the 3rd day.

Customer Service:

Can you please train your staff on Customer Support and Service. For a company as large as Airtel, we understand that there are always technical issues. Based on my personal experience, . The customer service is very poor. This is one of the worst I have seen (your folks hang up the phone when they are not able to solve issues – This also happened during Chennai Floods). They need more training and need to empathize with customers. We are provided with 10 different phone numbers, however none of them could really assist. How about you focus on quality than the # of people?

Systems:

Can you please improve your systems. If there is a ticket # assigned, why would the customer have to go over the same info. of the MUX#/ etc. over and over again. Can we improve the existing systems so the customers who have paid money get good service through excellent systems and process.

Account Managers/Local Support

We choose your brand because of your global presence and your local support. However, you can try calling any of your account managers from your cell phone and see if they pick up. Please make some mystery calls. You will know how frustrated your customers are.

From what I see, these are clearly people and system issues. There are clear leadership issues (at-least for your leased line business in Chennai). You clearly have a problem. Please fix it before it gets worse because I care for the Airtel Brand.

I hope this feedback helps. Happy New Year.