I had subscribed to MOBILE OFFICE on my GPRS phone last year. IN August I have sent the SMS for deactivation and got a response saying that it will be deactivated in 24 hours. There after I was never able to use the GPRS service as my phone was not registering with the airtel network for data access. After two months I Noticed that I am being charged a monthly fee of 399 towards Mobile Office even though I had unsubscribed and validated via Airtel payment centre in Koramangala that GPRS is not active. When I called customer care, they refused to accept it at first saying that now that the bill has been paid, it cannot be reversed. I told them that when they can charge me adjustments from previous bill cycles for bill already generated, they must offer this to the customer when they have wrongly charged the customer. After lot of deliberation, I decided to terminate the connection and pay the last pending dues. On this they quickly called up and agreed to give me one month reversal and a further Rs 150 towards 50% of the previous month as an adjustment, This was done on October 20th. Surprising in the october bill I see I have been charged for MOBILE OFFICE again on a prorata basis for 10 days from 11th to 20th. I dont see the logic of charging me again and citing the reason that the official disconnection happend on 20th. Airtel even verified that I had not downloaded any content over that period which I claimed my conection was inactive. The lame reason they kept giving me is that we have problem activiating it on your SIM card but not updated in Billing. IN any case this time I decided to terminate the connection. Again a bunch of people called me to find out what was my problem - They dont look at the call history to find out why I have requested termination and I spent close to 30 mins explaining it to every representative who called me. While the call was in progress the call dropped and the CSR didnt bother to call me. Then I got a call from the network department asking if I had asked for disconnection on which I told them that the previous discussion was incomplete. IN two hours they have gone ahead and disconnected my cell phone on 24th November. On 25th November when I check my online account on the airtel portal I see that my account and number is showing active, but all callers are getting a message that 'This is not a valid number' .. I cant understand how a big service provider like Airtel manages to run their customer support in such a bad manner. I have finally decided never to go with Airtel for cellular services. I shall be disconnecting my second number as well as I dont want to face any more issues with them.
-Solomon Thomas.
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