Tata Fry (err Tata Sky) has been in playing shenanigans mode since September mid when suddenly my TV stopped working. Ultimately it was found to be a problem in a connection box outside the home but they took more than 10 days to fix it and all the while kept charging even though I was opening a complaint every day, because they were closing the complaint every day without doing anything!
Here are the screenshots of various complaints filed by me and closed by their Just-Click-to-Close-Complaint-Department the same day. See the open date and closed date, such a prompt service! Except that it is the same complaint every day of unable to view services with secondary option of No Signal.
Eventually they refunded me the amount only for 3-4 days I think instead of the about 10-11 days the service was inactive. Hey I am just their prisoner, where I am going to go away if they don’t refund for full 10-11 days!
But they did not realize I was not enamoured of their service so much that I will continue using it after their MPEG4 box upgrade – which does not give an external RF out so I can record it on my external HDD recorder. So I let the service get deactivated by 6th Oct instead of renewing it when the balance got over.
From that time to this day, they have called me 3-4 times apparently worried that their prisoner may have decided to escape from the prison since he is not renewing the service. Their diabolical head must be thinking how can an individual live without watching TV for more than a month, and especially a jinga lala service like Tata Sky. Maybe they were just calling at regular intervals to keep checking whether I was still alive!
So they decided to play one more trick, maybe this one is their ace in the hole for recalcitrant customers/prisoners like me. They put a Rs 150 charge for god knows what service visit they claim to have done for me. I realized it only yesterday when I tried to recharge after all this time. I have filed a complaint already with them and someone with initials A called and seemed to share my concern. I informed him that if there is a service visit then they need to have a work order with my signature, which obviously they would not have. As a secondary point, I told him that my service is deactivated on 6th Oct after I did not recharge, so how come they are paying visits to customers whose account is deactive and with zero balance! Usually they will never do any paid service for you unless you recharge your account first. See the screenshots below showing the account deactivated date of 6th Oct and then a charge of Rs 150 on 11th Nov.
Does anyone doubt by now why Tata Sky should not be called Tata Fry? (or for customers it is like Bheja Fry maybe!)
I have always thought of an organisation for helping out the consumers in India. This isn’t a social welfare NGO or anything as such but instead it’s more of a Union of Consumers in India where all the buyers and purchasers in India unite against traders and manufacturers alike. Every purchaser who recieves a reciept of his/her purchase may provide the information of their product, the reciept, product’s warranty, manufacturer’s guarantee, the agreement/description brochure which came along with the product, purchase date, manufacturing date etc.
The so thought UCI will keep records of all the products which are purchsed every day by consumers in India, it will keep a record of products being offered in India by brands/manufacturers, what batch of itmes were made available during which date, what products aren’t authorized to be sold in India, which of the items in market can be the duplicates or permanently discontinued by the company, complaints against the traders/company warranties by the consumers, company/trader rating on the basis of complaints lodged against them for inefficiency/cheating, legal assistance for the consumers, filing consumer complaints and follow ups, drafting all the cases against the company/traders, keeping records of all the cases pending or solved against each govt registered pvt firm, manufacturer, trader etc and many such things.
Consumers in India will automatically become it’s member for free and they can avail different informations without paying anything. But for borrowing it’s services such as the legal matters, filing complaints, follow ups, drafting, gathering the trader’s/manufacturer’s history of consumer crimes, representation in various consumer forums in India and things likr that, member consumers shall be asked to pay a nominal fee.
Anyways the main motive of such an organisation’s is to unite and organize all the consumers in India from all walks of the society and empower us all against the treacherous and criminal minded traders/manufacturers, both national and international.
Hope someday we all might well build such an organisation, for all us Indians.
I think it’s one of those good/grand ideas, which will fail to materialize.
Excellent Videv!!!
Not sure when these service providers will realise the value of customers and stop treating us like prisoners.
By the way, what happened to that service charge of Rs 150 for not doing anything???
Regards
Sumana
About Rs 150 issue with Tata Sky, I haven’t yet filed consumer court complaint yet. I had filed it with core.nic.in many months back in Nov 2013, but they could not wring out a proper reply from Tata Sky. I am keeping my option open still, there is 2 years time limit to file complaint.