Tale of an Old business and a Social Customer

I went to BSNL, a traditional, state owned national telephony provider here in India, yesterday to get a new EV-DO connection (we will talk about it a bit later). Folks working there are quaint & older than those in the private service providers. Clean, but not necessarily well groomed. The lady at the customer service booth does not even use a mobile phone. She has a landline at home and at office. So per her admission she doesn't need one. And her employer hasn't given her one anyway. The exchange is in an old buliding, with overgrown grasses & shrubs, etc. and just an old man for 'security'.

People who have not had the experience of dealing with BSNL, can take a look at their corporate website & certainly get a feel of what they are offline too. Informational in parts, functional, not really usable, not much support. Pretty inside-out as some of my friends would say. Its actually a big change in BSNL that they have the most up to date information on plans, tariffs, etc. on their website. You can even quote it when you are dealing with the customer service folks!

And most people dread its customer service. I will reserve my judgment on that. As for me, I have been their customer for the past five years & my dad has been for far longer. I have been a customer of Airtel too - one of the leading telecom brands in India (which is actually a big thing globally speaking too, in sheer numbers, India has vast number of phones & mobiles). Without saying good or bad, I'll say that relatively speaking, Airtel customer service is not credible & BSNL's is not humble.

BSNL is however undergoing a marked change of late. It is providing some options that we savvy folks have taken for granted. Stuff like being able to change ones rate plan by calling up a call center rather than submitting a written application! Yes, BSNL until recently need you to submit a written application! Like the letter to the principal kind of stuff we were taught to write as kids.

And theres one hitch to this new change though.

Yesterday we wanted to change our broadband plan & when we asked the lady at the customer service center who should it be addressed to & what should we write, she said a written application will not be accepted & it has to be done via the phone. We were happy to know that. No more hassles of making a visit to the exchange/service center and thus face the traffic of Bangalore!

Then came an elderly lady asking abt the same (BTW, broadband does seem to be getting mainstream! There was another middle aged lady inquiring abt a new broadband connection. You can get one within a week even if you don't have a landline!). When she was told that she had to call a particular number, tell her consumer number (which can be found in her monthly bill) and then the plan she wants to change to, she was mortified! She faced a very daunting task! She told the customer service lady with a pleading voice that there was nobody at home to do it. The customer service lady, unable to help due to new processes, just tried to explain the old lady by repeating what she spoke earlier about the new steps to do the plan change.

As I said earlier in the post, I had gone shopping for an EV-DO card for my laptop. Let me take you through my buying process. I had a need arousal since I am traveling a lot these days as well as getting wire faults frequently. I needed an failover option for my wired broadband connection at home as well as be able to go roaming. Ofcourse I had seen so many people talk about their Tata Photon+ and Reliance Netconnect options on twitter. I also saw how handy were the AT&T data cards & MiFi cards (not available in India) when I traveled in the US at various events this year. So it was both an intrinsic need as well as influenced by external factors.

I then got into the information gathering phase to know my options. I found BSNL 3G, EV-DO, Tata Photon+ & Reliance Netconnect of course and checked out their tariffs on their respective sites after googling them. Google actually gave me links to sites that discussed about these products too like mouthshut.com & consumercomplaints.in. I turned to my online social networks too for more information on their performance, costs, etc.

Now armed with a lot of information, I zeroed in on BSNL EV-DO option since it had the least monthly charges - Rs. 750 for unlimited usage, whereas others gave you only 2 GB per month for that amount! That was the decision process

Next was the purchasing phase. I had to go to the customer service center & fill out a form and pay the amount. I couldn't get a demo, since the demo piece was given to someone. Not sure if it was sold off or given away. The customer service lady was livid. Not sure if it was real or made up, but she went on about how its a malpractice (durabhyasa) and should not be encouraged. I then asked her about the procedure to deactivate the connection. She was aghast & asked me why am I asking about disconnecting even before getting it. Seems there is a three month lock-in period before you can surrender your connection. But you still cant return the data card itself. Well, anyway, I paid the money, waited for a few minutes. She activated the card & gave it to me. I got back home.

Now begins my post purchase behavior. I tried plugging it into my laptop that runs Ubuntu. Ubuntu usually picks up most mobile broadband devices by default & usually doesn't require any driver download, etc. But I was in for a surprise. After inserting the sleek little glossy (with lots of our fingerprints) EV-DO card into the USB port, I could see a CDROM icon on the desktop!

Googling around I eventually found a fresh blog post with a detailed step by step instructions to get it working on Ubuntu 10.04. Both the data card & the OS are pretty new, only available in the past month or so and the combination is very minuscule. So this was quite unexpected but very welcome! Incidentally, I did not try the BSNL call centers for support!

I now only have to figure out where I can get those small cross headed screw drivers nearby so that I can open the EV-DO card & insert the R-UIM card to be able to connect. I have to get out into the real world for that & can't expect to find a solution from the social web! ;)

Update: Against all odds, I got a resolution to that issue about the screws too, on the same blog post, in the comments!