Customer Service and India

I have absolutely no idea why Customer Service and India do not gel well. No matter what product you buy, no matter how costly or premium it is, the customer service is always going to be bad.

Well, that’s my personal experience with many brands I have been customer of.

For example, few years back I had purchased Samsung’s 3D LED Smart TV, their display panel stopped working properly couple of times, I had to fight with them to get the replacement. They did once but denied it for the 2nd time. (Quoted me Rs. 40,000 for it)

A year back, I had purchased a shirt from Zara, the shirt’s color started fading out after 2nd or 3rd wash. They completely denied to accept the fault at first, it took me 3-4 months to get the replacement. This was, after I sent them legal notice. The cost of the shirt? Rs. 2,500 and mental torture? Endless.

Recent example include, a Coffee machine purchased from Cafe Coffee Day. It stopped working within 3-4 months of purchase. Raised the issue with the branch from where we had purchased, no action, raised it on Twitter, no action. Office guy had to literally yell at them, talk to their branch manager and what not to get this simple thing fixed. BTW we are still trying to sort this matter out.

The last one is from Apple’s authorized service center Maple. Had given my iPhone 5 for battery replacement. I was supposed to get the phone today, went to their service center to collect it, I was told, they have not received the battery from Apple. This is after numerous calls to their useless customer support helpline and waiting for 40 minutes at the service center. Had to yell at them and the result? They replaced the battery in 15 minutes flat. When I asked how did you get the battery? You did not have it? The answer? Sir, we got the battery couple of hours back and it wasn’t updated in our log.

The common factor in all the above example is, the customer needs to talk tough to get the work done from these brands. I have read several tweets, blog posts on people contacting company’s top management to get things sorted out etc..

But why these kind of things are needed? Why do we have to go higher ups to get simple things sorted out?

According to me, this is mainly happening because every customer support representative is worried about his / her job and do not want to take any risk by promising anything quickly. Or the people who train them are simply brain dead and do not know a single thing about how to treat customers.

In most of the examples, I am sure people at mid level designation can easily take a call and sort out the matter but none did. In most of the cases, I had to go higher ups to get the matter sorted.

I am not sure if this kind of problem exists in other countries or not but in India, it does exist almost everywhere.