Customer Service Rant #1 - Signature Kitchens

This is what I hope will be a series of rants (?) on the whole Customer Service Experience in India or put more specifically - Why Customer Service in India sucks! It's been three odd months after my move back to India, so I'm sure there will be many posts on this topic - here is the first in the series...

Will start with the most freshest in mind:

Signature Kitchens India Pvt. Ltd:

My wife has been wanting to redo our kitchen for quite some time now - and we finally decided to bite the bullet and go ahead. Our visit to a mall, a few weeks ago, was fresh in our mind - and we remembered Signature Kitchens as an option. So my wife called them up - they said that they charge Rs.500/- as designing charges where in they would give us two design "options". Fair enough - this guy comes over, takes a few measurements and we give him our requirements (as in what all we need in the kitchen). Among other things - he hasn't heard of a Sink Garbage disposal unit, he makes a few suggestions that seem quite green (as in green behind the ears and not eco-friendly) and says that two design options will be emailed to us.

So we get two designs - which have the following glaring lacunae:

• Dishwasher seemed missing (we found it under the sink apparently they had raised the height of the counter - in spite of us giving specific instructions on the height)
• No space for the Indian style mini-temple
• We had asked for a kitchen table - that was completely missing
• The Color scheme was good - but for a different house - it completely clashed with the tiles we have (The designer at SK had conveniently changed the flooring in the design to white from orange-brown).

So my wife sends them a polite email saying that you've basically forgotten stuff- can you take care of these points. Then comes an email from their manager saying that we need to come down (their office is essentially at the other end of town - and those driving in Pune's sucky traffic have a pretty fair idea of the painful journey to go across). So we send her an email saying sure we can come down - but we want to see the proper designs first.

Then, after a week of silence - we call up again. And the reply we get is that the "Company Policy" has now changed and we cannot send designs on email! Duh! After a week of silence - after calling them up - i.e. no proactive emails from them - we're pretty cheesed off! Here is a perfect case of a customer wanting a service - the SALE is NEARLY ALREADY MADE! All you have to do is not screw up!!

Wanting to escalate - I call up the manager and basically she tells me that I can go do what I want. She refuses to even give me a number of anyone higher up to escalate. Final stinker that I send to them is reproduced below...

"

Your service levels are pathetic!!!!

I have not experienced such rude and incompetent service (from ). Looks like you people do not want any business.

Your designs have not met even the BASIC REQUIREMENTS stated by us. And in spite of that you have the audacity to say that we cannot escalate this up! You people (especially ) don't know the basic meaning of customer service. I hope your Bangalore and Chennai service centers have some competent people at least!

Please refund the design amount immediately. If we have to come in to get the refund - we will be taking travel charges from you.

This will be escalated and I can assure you that there will be negative publicity on this."


Three days later - get a call from an "Accounts Officer" quietly asking us how we would like to be refunded. Last update - he would be sending a guy with the money to me.

Classic case on driving business away. No way in hell am I going to recommend Signature Kitchens India to any one!

People just do not get what Customer Service is about!

Upgrading my broadband connection...

Upgrading my Broadband...

Finally managed to upgrade my BSNL broadband from an unlimited 256Kbps to an unlimited 512Kbps (still dialup speed compared to the 6Mbps I had in the US)

Before I left (for the US in 2007) I was paying the equivalent of $10 for an "up to" 2 Mbps connection (limited, of course, to some GB). My tenant "upgraded" it to an
unlimited plan after getting one shocker of a bill (around 20,000 Rs ~ $400) one fine month. Guess that comes with having teenage children..
That plan, unfortunately had a speed cap of 256 Kbps.

Once in the US I was a little disappointed at the relatively high rates for broadband, not to mention that taking only Broadband was more expensive than taking a phoneline + broadband. So imaging my surprise (shock) when I get back 2 years later - Broadband has not gotten any cheaper - I cannot get a 2 Mbps connection (unlimited) without giving the proverbial arm and leg (or in this case at least the finger).

After a few days of "research" - which mostly constituted visiting broadband forum sites - came to the conclusion that Airtel could be a good choice. But I did want to give BSNL a fair chance before that.

Apparently you cannot submit a request online (the concept of doing anything online seems to be alien to BSNL), so after one false start on a Saturday that turned out to be the 2nd Saturday of the month (the BSNL office was closed) - went in and submitted an application (which was basically on a small slip of paper not even big enough to wipe your rear cleanly).
I was highly skeptical that the slip would make its way to the right place - so lo and behold my surprise when, on the following Wednesday, the net started feeling a little faster!
I found that it had been upgraded to 512 kbps. Miracles still happen! (I guess it is all about expectations!).

One problem I did face though - and this was on Friday evening and Saturday morning, some websites were not accessible (I could access google, linkedin, and other popular sites - but some sites just wouldn't open). A quick net search followed with all suggestions pointing to try and change the MTU size to a lower value.

After a couple of hours spent Saturday morning, which included changing the MTU on the macbook and the Dlink modem, I just gave up - but, lady luck was still smiling on me half an hour later everything was back online! I guess someone somewhere in BSNL must have reset some routers (I use opendns - so I don't think it was a DNS issue).

Next stop - deciding if I want one more "backup" connection or maybe a data card connection...

Replacing my Broadband ADSL modem

The last week has been interesting. My ever so reliable BSNL broadband connection gave way. I guess I must have bragged about its stability one too many times :-( .



The problem turned out to be in the modem (to be specific the power supply to the Modem). Didn't find this out easily though - after being shunted between the BSNL "Lineman" and the Broadband support guy (from a company called Syscon). After two days (and about 20 calls) the Broadband support guy finally shows up and confirms that the modem is out and I need to "come down to the BSNL office and get a new one". I tell him that if he can get me a modem - I'll compensate him for his efforts, as I really didn't have the time to go and buy a modem.



So he does that - ever so diligently. He installs the modem when I'm not at home - so I tell him that I will need to observe the connection for 24 hours before I can pay him.



I reach home after a hard day's work and find that the modem installed looks to be a used one (it even has a neat cut across the "Warranty void if seal broken" sticker).

I get livid and the guy from Syscon keeps changing his story from "It's a rental modem" to "You can buy the modem". He has a fishy "friend" with him who has supplied him with the modem. Long story short I tell him to take the modem and put it in a suitable place. I then order a D-Link GLB 802C ADSL2+ modem (I already have WRT54GL - flashed with dd-wrt, a Belkin N1 and a Belkin 4-port Gateway router - so I really needed something basic).



But the modem configuration turned out to be more than the plug and pray I hoped it would be.

Here's what I ended up doing (after connecting it to the Belkin WAN port failed to get me on the net) - and after 3 hours of futzing around with Dynamic IP mode and PPPoE mode on the Belkin router.



Connected directly to the modem through the Ethernet port with my macbook.

1. Access the Web admin GUI (through 192.168.1.1)
2. Disable the DHCP Server (set the DHCP mode to none)
3. Enable the BSNL connection (by default MTNL was enabled). Access this through the Quick Configuration link.
4. Put the modem in a "Bridge mode" - the Belkin gateway would take care of setting up the PPPoE connection (basically user authentication).
5. Pray

and it worked - I have my reliable net connection back!

Next challenge - figure out if the ~100 ms roundtrip to speedtest.net is ok.

Google's April 1st Joke - CADIE

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html

"For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster...."

Yawn.... nuff said

Why Apple bought PA?

So why did Apple end up paying $278 mil for PA Semi? I read Sramana Mitra's Forbes article on this and also Bob Cringley's post. While both have merits - and Bob's post does make more exciting reading than Sramana's all too simplistic explanation, here's my take on this:

Steve loves to design, more importantly push the limits of design. The one thing he does not control now (in the iPhone and Mac environments - apart from of course the content - think Movies) is the chip design part - and he has to rely on a whole lot of other companies (right from Graphics, Communications to normal processing) to tell him what can be done and what cannot.

Buying PA Semi gives him all the necessary brain power to find out if things can be pushed or not. So if Intel comes back with "It cannot be done this way" or an Infineon (a little exaggeration here) tells Steve that the latest 4G chip will consume X milli watts - Steve can very well extend the limits to what can and cannot be done here....

Google's April 1st joke

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

As lame a joke as any?

Windows XP Reinstallation saga

The Windows XP Home Edition on my home PC had reached its "end of life". I read somewhere that the average life expectancy of a Windows XP installation is 9 months (there's some irony here somewhere). What it means is that if you've had your Windows XP installed for over 9 months - you need to reinstall it. If you have been a normal Windows user - you will see the performance of the OS degrade over a period of time - mine started crawling - especially during boot up - I would switch on the machine and had enought time to take a bath, have breakfast and manage a quick nap on a Sunday morning! It became worse after I decided to be a really good user and download some stupid critical updates. After a series of updates - the OS just decided to give up on me and refused to boot up (Actually it just kept rebooting continuously). That is when I spent hours trying to find the update that screwed things up. I tried everything short of a complete reinstall - with no results. I did not want to do a reinstall (which, in hindsight, would have been the best thing to do). The only painful (and this was really painful) thing that worked was to boot into the command prompt (for this you need the Windows XP installation CD, BIOS configured to boot from the CDROM, choose the "repair installation" open). What I did after that is totally not recommended - unless you have lots of time. I went in to each of the update uninstallation directory (this is in the Windows directory - named as $NtUninstallKBxxxxxx$ where xxxxxx is the critical update number) and execute the unsinstall commands listed in the text files. These are essentially file copy commands - and you obviously can't do anything with the registry at this moment. What I did was just uninstall the latest updates. After my nth attempt - I was able to boot up! It's funny how you feel successful after doing something that was (in retrospect) totally useless and completely avoidable!

To be continued...