[Resolved]  Airtel — Unprofessional, incompetent and irresponsible response by AIRTEL and poor billing software

I am narrating complaint made to M/s. Bharti Airtel Ltd; New Delhi

Subject: Correction in bills for Mobile No:
Customer Name: Mithun Agarwal
Bill No: [protected]
Bill Date: 21/11/07
Period: 20-Oct-07 – 19-Nov-07

In the bill detailed as above a sum of Rs.4081/- has been charged for Value Added Services. On enquiry it was informed that these charges are for SMS. I have not made any SMSes. The charges for SMSes are totally wrong. My bill history shows that monthly bill amount vary between Rs.500/- to Rs.600/-.

I made several complaints to
1. By sending SMS on 121
2. Email at [protected]@ airtelindia.com
3. Calling Airtel Customer Care 121 and [protected]
every time I am told the matter is being looked into. I am unnecessarily being put to inconvenience of calling and writing to you. This careless attitude of Airtel amounts in deficiency in services.

In your reply to above it seems that you have not scrutinized the matter and have sent a routine reply. In this connection I have to submit as under again :

I note from your mail:
That billing system of Airtel is full proof and there is no manual intervention.

That the software captures the details of the SMS that subscriber make from mobile and generates the invoice.

That after the invoice is generated, Airtel take stringent measures to ensure zero defects.

That Airtel has checked and found that charges reflecting in your bill dated 21 November 2007 for SMS charges are valid.

I do not agree with you that billing system of Airtel can not make mistakes due to following reasons:
That billing system failed to detect that SMS are being sent at an interval of 2/3/4/… seconds. Is it possible for a human being to send a SMS every 3 seconds? I request you to provide the text of SMS.

I observe that billing software of Airtel has failed to capture the correct details of the SMS. The SMS being sent every few seconds has been caused by malfunctioning of the software. The software has also failed to observe the unusual activity of recording SMS’s every few seconds. Airtel's system has also failed to detect that there are land line and non existing phones to whom SMS’s sent have been recorded. Please make proper arrangements to detect such malfunctioning of the software and over charging the subscribers.

Airtel neither seem to have checked the invoice after its generation nor you have taken stringent measures to ensure zero defects. The details of measures taken may please be advised.

That Airtel has checked and found that charges reflecting in your bill dated 21 November 2007 for SMS charges are valid. Please advise the name and designation of the person who has checked this invoice and syatem adopted to check this invoice. I do not think that a person applying the simple principle of common sense would agree with this invoice, where SMS sent are charged every few seconds. Airtel did not look into the details of SMS sent again and advise with their observations and findings.

I feel that this episode need the widest publicity in the medias against such unprofessional, incompetent and irresponsible response by AIRTEL, their poor billing software and failure to detect unusual SMS's activity by their system.