[Resolved]  Vodafone India GSM Service — Happy to Help or Hell!

I would like to share my today's experience for all those of you are using Vodafone GSM Service. I hold 3 postpaid connections with Vodafone under the 249 CUG Plan and have been associated with Vodafone/Hutch for more than 5 years on the whole. I have been getting too many telemarketing calls, blank calls & wrong numbered calls lately on one of my connections. I thought the best solution to end this menace would be to get my number changed.

Today, after starting early to Office, I walked into a Vodafone Store located in Madhapur and to my horror I found only two Customer Service Executives present, one of them was sitting on the front desk (Enquiry and Token Issuer) and the second gentleman was assisting a Customer. There are a total of 5 Customer Service Bays and only one of them is operational, I repeat only ONE bay operational ' 20% service level in our language. After working for close to 3 years on Customer Sat % project and having AHT reduction in my DNA, what would you expect me to do? You are right, I counted opportunities - 8 Customers waiting including me which gives them an opportunity rate of 12.5% only, not to forget you have the 9th Customer being still being attended.

I know there are always exceptions and issues such as outage, late arrival etc do happen so I sat patiently just praying that another one or two Vodafone Customer Service Executive steps in and start resolving queries, actioning Customer requests or in Vodafone Terms ''Happily Help Us''.

15 Minutes later, waiting queue reduce to 6 including me and then another Customer walks in and starts talking to the front desk executive, 2 minutes later the front desk executive makes him sit just near the Single Customer Service executive and signals the executive to handle this brand new Customer first. This is the time when I pray for a Gun in my hand. Okay, at least a Baseball bat? Then quickly shifting my mind to the concept of Gandhigiri, I walked to the front desk executive and politely asked him if he believes in the logic of 'first come, first service' methodology. His face turned into a question mark, I tried a different approach by asking 'What is the token system for?'. He understood and replied 'Saaar (Sir), That Saaaar came early and then leave and come again'. Being a Hyderabadi, I understood what he wanted to say and then another Customer joined me saying that he was waiting 5 minutes from the time this store opened and did not see this brand new Customer stepping in. I looked back at the front desk executive thinking what would Gandhiji do now? Before, I could think of an answer, the executive defended asking us to be patient and wait for our turn (not as polite as the statement reads) and started blabbering in a local language which was not Telugu sounding as pissed as I should have been. I finally decided that it was time to protest, I raised my voice and demanded an explanation for the 4 empty bays. The simple reply was that the rest of the Team is in the evening shifts, come then and we will attend you. I wanted to thrash this fellow but comparing the built size of mine with his, I withdrew this idea and decided that I would just walk into a different store and if required even shift to a different service provider.

I cannot help but add that I have just started loving public sector better than private sector, at least they do not set wrong expectations with marketing lines like 'Happy To Help' which are only good to hear but not to experience.