Shocked, stunned, and utterly bewildered

Customer service in most sectors in India is pathetic to say the least. The so-called customer care executives are ill-prepared, sometimes ill-behaved (the callers are supposed to be ill behaved not them for god's sake! Although I strongly protest rude behaviours of customers with the executives), and most frequently plain ignorant! They have absolutely no clue about what they are doing and behave as though they are doing the customers a favour by giving them proper customer service.

The thing is, the concept of customer service has been alien to the Indian way of life until the huge economic, social and the paradigm cultural change/explosion which took place in the late nineties and the early 21st century. Since then the country has never had to look back, economically, politically, strategically and in various other aspects. But unfortunately, the sloppy Indian "chalta hai" (it happens) attitude clearly hasnt got accustomed to it even now!

And why do I say all this? Here's the story. I was unhappy with my Vodafone GRPS and wanted a more stable GPRS with less server outages. The only other option I had was Airtel, and I decided to go for it. What a stupid mistake that was!

Its almost a day since I took the connection, as of now, my GPRS services havent still been activated, although I have already paid them for my GRPS for this month! And to add to my woes, the Customer Care isnt responding to my calls! The stupid guy simply hung up while I was speaking! And to my utter surprise I found that I could no longer reach the customer care because apparently they had blocked my access to their support number. I later learnt that once such a thing happens the customer care is usually out of reach upto one week!

I am just stunned at how insanely nonsensical and callous the customer care folks can be! How on earth are companies paying money for these guys! I know I'm being harsh, but just imagine being stuck with a new SIM, with an inactive GPRS (after paying them money for it) and not being able to do anything about it, coz the customer care is dead! Simply dead! For god's sake why even have these offices if the company's not willing to give proper support to its customers.

Am really shocked, stunned and utterly bewildered at this apathy.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Piratebay sold!

Image via WikipediaThe event which millions of users were hoping would be avoided, just happened yesterday. Pirate Bay, one of the leading file sharing sites is selling out to Global Gaming Factory X, a little known Swedish gaming company for $7.8 million.

The acquisition will be completed by August this year, and the change of ownership will take place after that. What is interesting is a statement by Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF saying that they "would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site". I am sure after reading this, most users wont be amused. and they arent, reactions to blog posts on the site havent been very kind. "Sellouts" is the reaction almost everyone is using. Most users believe that after the takeover, all copyrighted content would be removed from piratebay. As some users put it, more than 90% of piratebay content is copyrighted stuff, so getting copyright permissions would mean that most contents would be removed. And this has infuriated most.

One thing is for sure. After the takeover, the number of users using piratebay is going to plummet, judging by the reactions. Infact the request for deletion of piratebay accounts have been so many that the team has decided to create an account deletion application.

This might well be the end of the road for Piratebay and as users put it, its curtains down for one of the most revolutionary sites ever.

Full Press Release here: http://www.globalgamingfactory.com/