Telenor customers cry, management remains unconcerned

Earlier, we reviewed Telenor online SIM booking and home delivery system that it has just started following a policy change of mobile SIM selling in Pakistan. We intended to give a follow up on the procedure and the response of customer care center representatives of Telenor.

We booked the SIM on Thursday, 21st February, 2013 and received an email confirmation from the autoreply service of Telenor website and then we called the customer care center to ask for the time of delivery.

The customer representative said that the SIM would be delivered within 24 working hours upon which we confirmed again that if it actually meant the next day or after 3 days. The CRO said that it would be delivered within three days. So we waited.

Experience with Customer Care Officers

After almost four working day since we booked the SIM, we called the customer center of Telenor to ask for the status of the SIM we had requested for. When we stated our purpose to the CRO, he better thought to redirect us to the concerned department.

The first CRO directed our call to Mr. Yasir and when we told him that we wanted to know the status of our online booked SIM, he redirected us again to some Mr. Noman who also did not know anything about the procedure and he once again directed us to Mr. Farhan in the “concerned department” who fortunately knew something.

Farhan took our details and asked us to wait. We waited and waited for at least 6 minutes during which he would constantly say that our details were being requested from the concerned department that why the SIM had not been delivered yet.

We asked if they could see the status of the SIM that we had booked to which he said that he was only capable of booking the SIM and could not see if the SIM number had been allotted or not as a CRO did not have access to the backend data.

After keeping us waiting for quite some time, Mr. Farhan asked for the CNIC against which the SIM number had been booked after which he told us that our complain had been sent to the concerned department which was responsible for dispatching of the SIM and that they would contact us within 3 to 4 hours.

This entire thing conversation started on 1:34 pm and ended after 16 minutes, by the end of which we were left quite frustrated.

We also received complaints from our readers about the voice service degradation of Telenor in most parts of the country. This is probably due to a network upgrade as we have come to know from various sources but this doesn’t stop Telenor from communicating with its customers.

The company could have run announcements through print or electronic media about a patchy service in the coming days but no one at the helm of affairs bothered to do so.

Response from Telenor

Before doing the story, we tried to have an official stance from Telenor’s communication department and sent the following questions;

• How long it takes to deliver a mobile SIM to customer if he/she has booked a new SIM through Telenor’s online interface?
• What time is required for delivering a SIM to customer if he/she ordered a SIM through IVR?
• In Case of online booking, does Telenor update the customer about a possible approval of SIM in his name?
• During last two weeks, there has been massive service issues in Lahore and KHI. Is there any particular reason behind this?

Although, Telenor’s spokesperson promised to revert back with answers and later apologized for a delay but she never sent us the actual stance. Most probably, Telenor didn’t want to comment on the situation or perhaps they didn’t have the answer.

I haven’t concluded yet that Telenor is worst in terms of communication but many a times when its customers cry, they just watch quietly and do nothing.