Yesterday, while using Airtel Live GPRS, I received a message saying “Fusion Lounge” service had been activated and that’ I would be charged Rs.15 every month. Being outside and quite busy, I decided not to call Airtel Customer Care up immediately. In fact, I had doubts whether the service was of Airtel since it looked quite spammy and had a link that did not seem to be an Airtel website.
Earlier today I was surfing through Airtel Live again, and I get a message saying 15 Rupees has been charged for Fusion Lounge. This time I called them up, and then hung up as soon as the rep picked up because I was needed elsewhere.
I called them up again in the evening today and I’m put through to an inexperienced young lady struggling to speak English. Fine. Most of Airtel’s CC is of this type anyway. What pissed me off was that even though she had heard about Fusion Lounge, she had NO idea how it was activated, she wouldn’t agree she about that, and rushed me up into deactivating it. Throughout the call the rep blamed ME for the activation and said that it was entirely MY fault. I mean, WTF? Here I was having absolutely no idea what Fusion (Shit) Lounge is and she’s telling me I had activated it. After I strongly objected, she told me I must have activated it without my knowledge. I object again. I ask her how the service is activated. The reply I get – “You must have pressed some button while browsing Airtel Live”. I ask which button and she replies to me saying “some button”. I proceeded to question her about HOW Fusion Lounge is activated, to which she FINALLY confessed to having no clue about. She then deactivated the service and redirected me to 12118 – the Airtel GPRS Customer Care Helpline. (They have a dedicated GPRS helpline. I suppose they get a LOT of GPRS complaints like this.)
The “I-dunno-English-saaar, how may I assist you” rep at 12118 asked me to call up 121. Just great. (Surprisingly I didn’t blow my head off at him.)
I decided that this would be the last time I call up 121 and speak to a rep. This time however, the rep asked me my problem and then my name. He immediately said that the money would be refunded within an hour. (Wait, WHAT?!) He continued to tell me that if the service was activated again and I wanted a refund, it would not happen AT ALL. He told me that I must have browsed “Handygo daat caaalm” and clicked on a subscription for, I quote, “nazara tech, f technology”. A quick Google Search took me to this horribly designed website.
Oh, this is the first time my money has been reimbursed by Airtel, and that, within a couple of minutes. I’ve been put through 45 day waiting periods only to be told that the money will not be refunded. Raises eyebrows as to why they refunded the money this time and so quickly too.
P.S. – I should probably make a separate category for Airtel, and call it “Airtel Rants” maybe?
airtel sucks
time to move on