MTNL Mumbai — Service not provided despite paying charges, rude and unhelpful staff

Address:	Mumbai City, Maharashtra
Website:	mtnlmumbai.in

My experience with MTNL's customer support and data service is nothing short of an absolute nightmare. I know that government companies are bad but my experience with MTNL was beyond appalling. I called MTNL's 1503 number and subscribed to a postpaid data plan on 15th October 2015. I received an SMS stating that my request had been completed. However, since I did not seem to have received the data connection yet, I registered on their customer service website and re-opened the request ticket. The site malfunctioned and did not allow me to enter any information within the ticket, but it did show the status as reopened. A few hours later, the ticket was closed again. I tried to register a complaint on their site and it again returned an error message and did not let me submit it. I called their 1503 number again and the nightmare started. The first operator told me to wait a little longer so I waited for another day and called back. Then another operator told me the signal in my area may be weak, so I tried again from different locations in the city as I travelled around but still no data. Several operators put me on hold and disconnected the call. I tried registering a complaint on the customer care website but it returned an error message on hitting the submit button and did not register my complaint. How convenient! After calling at least 20 times over 2 days, the 1503 operator gave me another number (1925) and told me to call them. The 1925 operator told me to call 1503 again. They kept bouncing me back and forth 5 times in a row. By now, I had performed the configuration setting manually over 10 times and had the operator message me the automated configuration settings twice, but nothing worked. I kept calling for 5 days in a row, after which I personally visited an MTNL customer center. The staff there told me to call the 1503 number for assistance. I showed them my cell phone call history, which, by that time, had over 40 calls to their customer service numbers in the past few days. They then told me that the people who knew how to check this weren't in the office and usually came in around 2:30 PM. I told them I had to go to work and asked whether they would be there earlier on another day but they kept saying that those people come in after lunch. I do not know whether those people work in a different shift or just come in late to work every day but I find it odd that there was not one person in the customer service center at 12:15 PM that could help out. I left as I had other commitments and tried calling the MTNL numbers again. By this time, I had made over 50 calls over a period of 5 days and still did not have a working data connection. After several calls that kept bouncing me between two numbers, I finally reached someone who symbolize the behaviour of government company employees better than any other. The last customer service executive I spoke to told me (in Hindi), "You will have to solve this yourself.This is not my problem, what can I do about it?" I asked her to cancel my data plan and return my money when she replied, "Do you think this is a private company that we will return your money? This is a government company. I'm not going to give you your money back." Disgusted and cheated, I came straight to this website to post this review. I will NEVER subscribe to another service from MTNL again!