Location/place: Kolkata, West Bengal
Name of company/service: Tata Photon
My Tata Photon no. is 9230032209 and I registered a request for termination of services with Tata Photon’s Park Street (Kolkata) outlet on the 22nd of August 2012. The disgruntled customers all around should have been a warning, however the employee at the desk politely “accepted” our request and sent an email to the required authorities who would process the termination request within ten days, and will give us a call regarding the same. When asked why he could not terminate services from the Park Street office itself, he said that some technical glitches were the reason why he had to delegate the cancellation order to some other place for the time being. We even asked for a receipt or a docket no., provided somebody claimed later that no grievance had been registered! But the employee assured us that the mail has been sent and that I will hear from the authorities within ten days.
We were also expressly informed that the final bill would be prepared on a pro-rata basis, and I would receive the bill after the cancellation procedure has been processed and done with.
Two weeks later on the 7th of September 2012, when I was on the verge of calling the ISP to know the status of my cancellation request, I received the bill for August 2012, which was NOT on a pro-rata basis, but a regular bill of Rs. 556/- (the full usage). Owing to family matters and my profession, I asked my partner to call Tata Photon up and intimate them about the wrong bill.
When she called them (1-800-266-121), she was intimated that no cancellation request had been registered on the 22nd of August and that they would register it immediately. However, we would have to pay the bill that we received and perhaps even the September bill, since the delay in placement of request would result in yet another bill being generated. She was given a Cancellation Request no. 325994227.
Upon hearing this ludicrous conjecture, I called the same number up on the morning of the 8th of September 2012. I talked to a Tata employee Mr. Himanshu Singh, and upon recounting the entire incident all over again and expressly threatening to go to the consumer court, I was told that I would be sent a pro-rata bill (upon confirming that there has been no usage of Photon since the afternoon of the 22nd, when the cancellation request was originally placed) and no additional bills would be generated and that my issue would be resolved within a few days.
I am looking forward to the issue being resolved soon. I was wrong to assume that the ‘Good’ service that Tata Photon had given me for the past one and a half years would stretch till the time I would cancel their service. Every single person trying to surrender his/her Tata Photon seems to be having some problem or the other (As is evident from the countless grievances all over the Internet or the crowd of people having to wait 2-3 hours in the Park Street office to register a complaint/cancellation request which is completely ignored later. Even I waited for the better part of two hours on a busy weekday in order to lodge the fruitless cancellation request).
Either Tata Photon hires completely clueless people who are terribly bad at their jobs, or this is part of an executive directive given to the poor employees- who are often the receiver of the customer’s verbal wrath, to swindle and squeeze some more money out of the people who are about to surrender their Photon services!
-Jagannath Chakravarti
(Ph. 9831928010)
Tata Photon no. 9230032209
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