Sunday, November 21, 2010

Service (?) in Disguise !

These days i have been thinking on the different services available around us for a common man. I wonder if these are really genuine services. One such service that i have used many a times is the online movie ticket booking. This service comes with a fancy term "convenience fee". Is this just a convenience for the customers alone ? It makes their jobs organized and easier as well isn't it. Also shouldn't that be part of service provided to customers. Setting up an online system wouldn't cost the theater huge money i believe.... and for the rest of his life he gets to charge it as convenience fee from the customer !!!

Another service that i came across was the online funds transfer facility provided by most of the banks these days. The NEFT transaction is charged by couple of banks. I know of SBI and Citibank at-least. They charge a fee of 5.00 INR for every NEFT transaction. why should the banks charge this fee in the first place ? Are they encouraging people to use the paper cheques more than the online paper-less transaction ?
ICICI and HSBC as of now do not have any such charges.(at least till the last transfer i am not aware of any such charges)

Another innovative way of charging customers as part of service is the Airtel's Customer care desk. If you happen to reach the customer care officer, your call will be charged with some nominal amount (guess it is 50ps for 3 minutes). Though this looks like a small value, imagine the number of customers calling and speaking to the customer care executive and that in turn being charged !! what a way to generate revenue. So the monthly rentals do not cover up customer care charges !!

Service providers are really doing a good job at innovating different methods to provide service with a fee !
so are these really services to the customer ???

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Fraud Cards / Credit Cards ?

Recently I had to go through some shit because I had agreed to some telemarketing call sometime during 2007-2008. I had taken a HSBC Gold Credit Card. Things seemed fine till date except some glitches last year. Although I enjoyed the reward points from HSBC.

Last year I happened to see that I had been charged with INR 3000 plus service charges as annual fee (INR 2000 for the primary card and INR 1000 for the add-on card) in my HSBC credit card statement. I called up the customer care and asked the phone banking executive as to why this amount was being charged. He told me that it was done in accordance with the banks policy.

I had the following questions thrown at the phone banking executive

Q1) why was I not being charged with annual fee all these years? All of a sudden I see these charges. I had not received any communication from the bank indicating the changes.

A1) Sir, sometimes bank do give a waiver on annual fee. But it is not mandatory to give it to every customer.

Q2) When there are many other banks which are throwing free credit cards at customers, why do you think anyone would want to have an HSBC card by paying an annual fee ?

A2) Yes sir. But this is as per bank policy. However I can raise a case and have the Annual fee charges removed. Also I will convert your card to a lifetime free credit card.

Year 2009 passed. In 2010, the same incident repeated. However with a small twist. The Annual fee on my primary credit card was waived automatically whereas the fee on my add-on card was not.

I called up the customer care asking them to waive the Annual fee as my card was a life time free credit card. I narrated the entire story to the phone banking executive.

But to my surprise, this time the Customer care was quite blunt on me and told me that there was nothing he could do this time. I told him that the card is a life time free card, to which he responded that my add-on card was not a lifetime free card.

I told him that I will not make the payment no matter what. This is “day-light robbery”

I asked him to tell me what I was supposed to do to avoid the annual fee. He told me just cancel the add-on card , then I will not have to pay the annual fee,

I agreed and asked him to cancel the card.

Now my mind started thinking in a different direction altogether. I had the following questions bothering me

1) why should we be at the banks mercy for such incidents.

2) Banks are cheating customers in broad day light !

3) What should I do to not fall victim to such cheap behaviour from a reputed Multi-national bank ?

Just recently I had read about the RBI Ombudsman. I had checked out the website as well.

I decided to go ahead and lodge a complaint against HSBC with the Ombudsman.

Within days of registering the complaint, I received a letter from HSBC along with the copy of the Application form that I had signed years ago!

Now came the actual surprise!. I was shocked to see a reputed Bank like HSBC making false claims in the letter addressed to me.

I was totally pissed off with this communication from HSBC. I had made up my mind that banks cannot dictate terms with Customers as per their whims and fancies.

I was thinking on how to go about this incident. I received a letter and an email from the RBI Ombudsman indicating the complaint had been addressed.

Now I started getting really suspicious, that HSBC had just tried to get away with the complaint by formally addressing the case...Just for the heck of formality.

The letter addressed to me stated that some one from HSBC had spoken to me on this matter! That was the first false statement in the first paragraph of the letter.

The letter also mentioned that they (HSBC) had exceptionally converted the primary card to a life time free card sometime in August 2008 based on my representation with the Phone Banking Executive. Also they mentioned that as a service gesture they were reversing the annual fee and both the primary and the add-on card was closed!!!

I now realized that just recently when I tried using my credit card, it didn’t work. The card was declined

This pissed me off big time and I registered another complaint with the RBI ombudsman, I also mailed HSBC customer care informing them that the letter addressed to me was not based on actual facts and if they didn’t bother to address this fairly, then I would have to take the legal path to get this issue sorted out. If the primary card fee is reversed and when i as a customer know the fact that the primary card was converted to a life time free credit card, why would i want to cancel it ? (unless i had other reasons)

After this they realized that they had not dealt with the issue professionally and someone from HSBC got in touch with me. I told them that it was not a joke to issue a credit card and cancel it as per their wish! The bank has no right in cancelling the card unless you have not paid your credit card due on time!

Finally the bank got my card reinstated...Linked the existing credit card account to the new card issued! They finally Acknowledged that the bank had both the card closed though the request was placed only for the add-on card cancellation.

I did not want to allow these institutions to dictate terms or manipulate the situation!



Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Influenced Or Confused??

Influenced Or Confused??

I have been thinking about the difference between "Being Influenced" & "Being Confused”...This phase has been on and off in my life and I am pretty sure most of you would have experienced the same.

It all started with believing in God. In childhood I was forced to believe in god and was never given a choice! Later after years I realized people were following things blindly without their own thought. I decided to not to believe in God because I didn’t know if God exist nor do I know now (And I don’t have the time to invest in finding out the fact)

My childhood was so much influenced with the thought of God, Miracles, Benefits of believing in god; that at times when I would not know what to do. I would just blindly believe in god and pray for good results. Was I confused or was I influenced (forcefully taught)??? Too soon to answer this question...let me keep it aside for a while

People chose topics in engineering based on how easy it would be to get good marks/ to even pass the subject. I always believed that this education system was not the ultimate test and took up topics which were not the usual ones. (Though I failed miserably in getting good marks :-)) No regrets though because I am happy with my current job

There was a time when I did pray to god that if you help me clear the exams I will visit you ( with so many clauses in it, that I will skip my meal, I will visit you bare foot and what not !!)

After this phase things were going on pretty smooth and I CHOSE to be an Atheist.

Now it’s the Mission of Marriage. My family started consulting Astrologers, Visit Temples to pray God to get me married to a good girl. They believed that these were the things that mattered for a happy married life!

I was asked to wear a silver ring with some stone in it which was very much required based on the planetary positions for my marriage to occur. Initially I just wore it without any questions being asked, thinking it would make them happy. Later with time my thinking kicked in and I decided to get rid of the ring …but then I did get confused...And had the following thoughts in my mind

a) Will this ring help me in my Mission (Mission Marriage?)

b) No harm in just wearing it whether it helps or not...But still opens up a channel of good luck if the stone were really to influence my life …

c) How in the hell would a planet/star influence my life??

Ufffhh …A engineering graduate by education and a software professional involved in the development of Next-Gen products believing or confused around such things. I wish my manager doesn’t get to know of these things...He would kick the hell out of me and would wonder if I should be given new responsibilities when I myself am dependent on as powerful as a RING!

People look up to astrological predictions based on stars. But science tells me that there are stars which have died but then they were so many million light years away from us that the light of the star is still traveling!! So are we supposed to be influenced on stars which do not exist???

Do we really need to know our future ? If we knew the future would we live the present moment ?



If people were to be told that "No matter what he/she would become rich" they would just stop doing what ever they were supposed to do until they were rich! If people were told that "No matter what they would never be rich " they would still do the same thing.

I chose to get out of such things! I don’t want a ring to influence me! I would rather want my powerful processor to influence my life

After much thought I think people get into such things for various reasons

Or are people really not aware of what they want? I believe that there is a very thin line between “Being Influenced” and “Being Confused”

When one happens to be confused, he/she starts looking out for solutions. The laziness factor being the strongest (what an irony!!), in most human beings, decides to chose the path chosen my people around you. We see people who are successful with 10 rings on all their fingers! And decide to go for it. Did we think if we were being influenced or were we confused as to what next?? I guess the answer is mostly No.

At this point in time when man kind is busy with all possible technological innovations do we really want to be in the world where we want inanimate things / things that don’t even exist to influence us?

Why doesn’t a human being think before Entering the Influenced/Confused State? One simple Question (Life is Simple .Do Not Make it Complicated) would make a lot of difference

Is this what I want? Before getting influenced

What do I want? When confused.


Am I posting this in a confused state or am I posting it on being influenced with my thoughts? Well...No Comments J

Don’t get confusingly influenced or influence confusingly!!