M/s CARE The Maintenance Group
Poor Service and non-response request for refund of annual fee

This refers to my membership number 1852 (Membership form no). I had enrolled into the

general house maintenance plan of M/s Maintenance group on 16th March. In the first couple of months my experience with service offered by your company has been far from satisfactory. I stopped availaing of the service after the inittail 2 months and put in a request for refund of membership vide letter dated 12th April. I had the following problems with the service provider.

Firstly, time to respond to our complaints was not up to our satisfaction. Secondly, the nature and quality of response was not even up to a basic mark. To cite a few instances:•

The contract provisions for responding to the calls in 24 hours. Practically none of our calls were responded to within this time period. Always, one or the other excuse was given for the delay of 1 or more days and in some cases up to 10 days e.g. service of air conditioners even when the ambient temperature was above 40 0C. It amounted to pleading to agency to attend to our calls.

Some of the examples of reasons cited for delay were the carpenter/ plumber not being available; nobody picked up the phone at our residence; the person went to a wrong address and therefore has now gone to attend the next client and then will turn up only in the evening; since it is evening so the remaining complain will be attended to next day; the engineer suffered an electric shock so could not attend to complaint etc.

Even when the complaint is attended next day, it is not in the morning but late in the afternoon or evening (4-5pm) when no other alternative can be explored, both by the company or by any other service provider that we may have wanted to explore. As a result we had to suffer the agony.

A service engineer who would turn up at 6:30 pm in the evening after attending to calls the whole day behaved irritated, rushed up things and did not even bother to answer our queries properly.

While it is understandable that certain services e.g. air conditioner service have seasonal increase in calls, it is also expected that to ensure the quality of service the company should provision for extra manpower to deal with such surge in demand. I could not perceive that happening at the company's end.

Response to the complain should generally be a one-stop solution. But this was rarely the case here. Certain personnel attend only to part of the problem, the rest was to be dealt by another person. This often leads to delay in attending to our calls and mixed signals/diagnosis of the problem provided by the company 'engineers'. One person assessed the problem on day 1 and then another person came over to assess the problem next day before a final opinion was given while the problem kept lingering on and was attended to on day 3, if we were lucky.

My nature of jobs makes me travel outside of Delhi and India frequently. As a result I opted for this service, though not very cost effective for me, to allow my elderly parents to have a reliable and timely maintenance service which is just a phone call away. In the entire 2 months or so period, they did not make even a single emergency call to the company except for repeated pleading for servicing of air conditioner. They were told that this would be done after almost 10 days. Even after more than 15 days of the initial request they had to suffer in heat for such a long time with no respite due to a completely incoherent response from service providers.

In my several conversations with Mr Rahul Anand towards the end of first month of contract, I had expressed my dissatisfaction and desire to withdraw from the contract and refund of the enrollment fee (after adjusting fee on pro-rata basis). I was assured by him that he will improve the quality of service and that he will give a weekly call to my parents and check if everything was fine. While apparently lot of emphasis was given on efforts and processes on his part in his calls, there is no mention of the outcome, which in any case was far from satisfactory. This was a consistent pattern that I observed. Also there were no weekly calls from Mr Anand.

Under the given circumstances, I decided to withdraw my membership amicably and put in a written request based on the suggestion of Mr Rahul Anand. However, after repeated enquiries there was no action from the end of M/s Care - the maintenance group. Mr Ananad stopped answering to my calls. It was only when I warned the group through an sms to Mr Anand that I would be forced to approach the Consumer forum that on 11 June Mr Vasudev contacted me. I forwarded the matter of the request letter to him by email and he responded by mentioning that the group is looking into the matter. There is no response since then. I have thus decided to approach the consumer forum and request the forum to kindly redress the harassment and inconvenience caused to me and my family by the callous and inefficient functioning of M/s Care-the maintenance group. I request you to kindly facilitate the refund my membership fee at the earliest.

Company: M/s CARE The Maintenance Group
Country: India
State: Delhi
City: North Delhi

  <     >