Dear Indians, I would like to share the harrowing experience that I had with Airtel. I have been an Airtel customer for about 9 years. I started using Airtel 2G GPRS service on a postpaid connection 1 year back and on a monthly Rs 98 2G GPRS plan. My monthly GPRS usage over the last 1 year has been at most times less than 100 MB which is well below the monthly 1 GB limit.
Last month though my Airtel billing showed 1900 MB of GPRS usage in just 4 days between 26-Oct-2012 to 29-Oct-2012. This GPRS usage has resulted in me being billed an additional Rs. 10548 which is well above the credit limit.
The important thing to note is that Airtel did not alert me on time when my unbilled amount crossed my credit limit. Further, Airtel did not alert me on time when my GPRS usage approaching \ crossed the free 1 GB after which Airtel started charging me beyond that free usage at the rate of Rs 10 per 1 MB. The alerts were sent significantly late which means I did not get a chance to prevent the significant financial loss.
Further, since I did not initiate any downloads myself I requested Airtel to provide the details as to how such high volume of data (1900 MB) was used in just 4 days but Airtel has communicated that they cannot provide those details. To this day I sincerely do not know what may have caused that high GPRS usage.
I have also submitted a complaint on the Indian government’s public grievance website but that has not resulted in Airtel providing me answers to my queries until now.
In response to my public grievance complaint, Airtel provided incorrect feedback that details regarding GPRS usage were sent to me on a regular basis which is actually not true.
The problem would never have resulted if I was alerted on time and from my viewpoint it is also the responsibility of provider to stop high usage beyond the credit limit.
From my perspective I am now being asked to pay a high bill by Airtel when the fact is that Airtel did not prevent usage beyond credit limit and did not alert me on time.
Request anyone else who may have faced a similar problem to share their experience as well and if possible suggest the steps that should be taken in this scenario.
The objective of this post is also to make everyone aware of the fact that you will have to very careful if you have a Airtel postpaid connection and that you can be billed a very high amount even with a credit limit restriction in place. This is because significant financial damage may have been caused by the time the delayed alert is received by you.
I have been discussing this problem with Airtel for more than 40 days now but I have still not received answers to my queries.
I had to spend a lot of time and energy discussing this issue with Airtel my requests for information has been ignore repeatedly and while I may have no choice to pay the high bill because I have been using this Airtel number for such a long amount of time, I would like to ensure that no one else faces the same problem in the future so that they do not lose their hard-earned money like what has happened in my case.
I have shared a lot of instances of other Airtel users facing the same problem which goes to prove that this problem wherein (its GPRS users are caught unawares with the high usage and billing) existed a long time back and from that perspective it is quite reasonable to assume that Airtel should have taken proper steps to prevent financial loss and loss of confidence in its user community. The least that Airtel could do was to alert the user. Instead I am being told back that I should switch to prepaid to prevent the usage beyond free and credit limit. This is from my viewpoint almost admitting that are currently no procedures in place to safeguard the interests of its users and in fact extremely disappointing. I used to think that Airtel is a customer centric brand but after the trouble, pain and frustration and unprofessional behavior at times in terms of breaking promises made to me I am beginning t think otherwise. I am still taking all the efforts to resolve the issue but I ma not receiving the support that I am looking for. what happened in my case if really not very hard to understand and it is certainly not rocket science. I have now gone more than midway to resolve the problem and it is now Airtel to acknowledge the efforts and time that I have spent on this issue. At this point even Airtel presence, which think is the primary contact between Airtel and its user community is ignoring my queries.
Thanks and Regards,
Vikrant S Patil
+91-9892873688
Last month though my Airtel billing showed 1900 MB of GPRS usage in just 4 days between 26-Oct-2012 to 29-Oct-2012. This GPRS usage has resulted in me being billed an additional Rs. 10548 which is well above the credit limit.
The important thing to note is that Airtel did not alert me on time when my unbilled amount crossed my credit limit. Further, Airtel did not alert me on time when my GPRS usage approaching \ crossed the free 1 GB after which Airtel started charging me beyond that free usage at the rate of Rs 10 per 1 MB. The alerts were sent significantly late which means I did not get a chance to prevent the significant financial loss.
Further, since I did not initiate any downloads myself I requested Airtel to provide the details as to how such high volume of data (1900 MB) was used in just 4 days but Airtel has communicated that they cannot provide those details. To this day I sincerely do not know what may have caused that high GPRS usage.
I have also submitted a complaint on the Indian government’s public grievance website but that has not resulted in Airtel providing me answers to my queries until now.
In response to my public grievance complaint, Airtel provided incorrect feedback that details regarding GPRS usage were sent to me on a regular basis which is actually not true.
The problem would never have resulted if I was alerted on time and from my viewpoint it is also the responsibility of provider to stop high usage beyond the credit limit.
From my perspective I am now being asked to pay a high bill by Airtel when the fact is that Airtel did not prevent usage beyond credit limit and did not alert me on time.
Request anyone else who may have faced a similar problem to share their experience as well and if possible suggest the steps that should be taken in this scenario.
The objective of this post is also to make everyone aware of the fact that you will have to very careful if you have a Airtel postpaid connection and that you can be billed a very high amount even with a credit limit restriction in place. This is because significant financial damage may have been caused by the time the delayed alert is received by you.
I have been discussing this problem with Airtel for more than 40 days now but I have still not received answers to my queries.
I had to spend a lot of time and energy discussing this issue with Airtel my requests for information has been ignore repeatedly and while I may have no choice to pay the high bill because I have been using this Airtel number for such a long amount of time, I would like to ensure that no one else faces the same problem in the future so that they do not lose their hard-earned money like what has happened in my case.
I have shared a lot of instances of other Airtel users facing the same problem which goes to prove that this problem wherein (its GPRS users are caught unawares with the high usage and billing) existed a long time back and from that perspective it is quite reasonable to assume that Airtel should have taken proper steps to prevent financial loss and loss of confidence in its user community. The least that Airtel could do was to alert the user. Instead I am being told back that I should switch to prepaid to prevent the usage beyond free and credit limit. This is from my viewpoint almost admitting that are currently no procedures in place to safeguard the interests of its users and in fact extremely disappointing. I used to think that Airtel is a customer centric brand but after the trouble, pain and frustration and unprofessional behavior at times in terms of breaking promises made to me I am beginning t think otherwise. I am still taking all the efforts to resolve the issue but I ma not receiving the support that I am looking for. what happened in my case if really not very hard to understand and it is certainly not rocket science. I have now gone more than midway to resolve the problem and it is now Airtel to acknowledge the efforts and time that I have spent on this issue. At this point even Airtel presence, which think is the primary contact between Airtel and its user community is ignoring my queries.
Thanks and Regards,
Vikrant S Patil
+91-9892873688
