CRM: customer relationship management is mainly divided into 2 major portions i.e. customer acquisition & customer retention. The later is in a sense difficult as nowadays it is quite easy to acquire customer as you can lure them through all the marketing bling bling as well as the cost related to switching has been stripped to minimal.

However things over here have been quite opposite. Take for example a recent incident happened to me. Having switched home recently I asked my cable service provider ( for tv and internet) worldcall to switch my account to new home. The actual process only demanded disconnection of wire from the poll near my old home and connecting it to the poll near my new home.

So I called there helpline(need not to mention with how much difficulty I got there changed uan) and asked how much I’ll be charged for this? The lady there told me, it will be 500. I inquired, why is it so because it will just cost you only a visit and nothing else, being a customer for past 4 years I know how much it does. The lady insisted it is fixed cost. Then I went to there local office and these guyz told me after logging my request that it will cost me 1k. I was surprised and said, well someone on helpline told me its 500. He said well someone might have misguided you. I was shocked at the selection of words. So immediate response was, what!!. Are you trying to tell me that someone from you head office which is acting as a user interface is misguiding me, how can I be so sure that you are not misguiding me as well, however I asked him to come to the house and do whatever to switch my connection.

I came back and with sheer anger I called there helpline again and this time a gentleman picked up the phone. He also told me the charges are 1k and when I argued he said the cost of all the extra cable is on us.

However I ended up paying 2k for switching plus extra cable. Now the extra shocker is that if I had bought a new connection without telling them it would have cost me less and they would have given me modem and all the cable for free. Now after a hectic day I was sitting here in my new room and thinking when we will be a lil more sensible about customer relationship management and start giving preference to ease of customers instead of ours. 

Story doesn’t end here. .Not to my surprise it happened in a way that when I connected my cable to my tv it didn’t work so as a makeshift arrangement I started using my internet cable for the purpose (which resulted in immediate stoppage of internet usage). So for the next 2 weeks I had to run around trying to get someone from worldcall to fix it, including trips to there offices and hundreds for phone calls. As nothing was bound to happen with worldcall’s prior reputation I finally ended up visiting area’s sales manager and said to him, sir I climbed on the poll and disconnected wire from my previous home myself, if you really want I can connect this one myself if you are so short of manpower. I personally don’t give damn to why I am not getting the required support but if you can’t help me atleast say that you guyz are incapable of such basic support activity. Specially when I have paid so much for the switching. The manager told me that he was really sorry for all the hassle and if I had come to him, he would have assured a smooth transition. However as far as paying is concerned we give you all the cable in that 1k cost. I was shocked with such an ignorant reply from an areas sales manager. I said,’i have paid 1k extra for the cable’. How come being an area’s sales manager you don’t know what is included in the package and what is not. The guy got a little worried due to me catching him red handed but I’ll leave the discussion for some other day.

To sum it up I had to drive back a support guy in my car to get worldcall to fix my cable and it finally got fixed but took hundred’s of phone calls, few leaves from the office, a lot of irritation and almost a month.

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