Sometime ago Hutch aimed at revamping their brand image by changing the color of their logo to pink. Spice Telecom followed with something more than that. They decided to spice up their brand image with five various colors. If only someone could tell the no-so-intelligent honchos up there at Spice Telecom that they need to do more than just changing logo colors to live up to their tag line of, ‘Spice hai toh Life hai!’.
Spice Telecom had been enjoying a monopoly in the Punjab mobile phone service provider sector for several years until Airtel jumped in and followed by Cellone, Hutch and subsequently other CDMA service providers like Connect, Reliance and eventually Tata Indicom. The entry of Airtel which promised lowest call rates did make Spice Telecom sweat and thus a healthy competetion was born. Cellone and Hutch followed and the market exploded with offers, value added services and desperate attempts by companies to rope in as many consumers as possible. While Airtel attracted several customers with their value added features, prompt customer support and cheap tariffs, Cellone followed by offering the cheapest tariffs. And years after that, Spice Telecom is still remains in a pathetic state. The customer care is unreachable. Corporate customers aren’t treated any better than the normal customers. I’ve personally had some rough experiences speaking to their customer care executives. Someone forgot to explain the meaning of the phrase, ‘customer care’ to them surely. Billing is always a hassle. Unwanted, enexpected debits always appear on the monthly bills. Repeated attempts to inform the customer care fail. Add to that the pathetic state of their current application software which seems to be crying for an update. Their voice mail service is highly unreliable with where messages delete themselves as per their own will. Try checking your pending amount and they just get lost after making you wait for a few minutes and all that you hear is, ‘Thank you for using Spice Services!’. Pay using their online billing services with your credit card and sleepless nights are assured! Sometimes the amount only gets credited to your account only when you call up the sleepy heads at their office and inform them of the payment made. After a few e-mails and hard-to-reach calls to customer care, my amount for the bill which I paid last month using a credit card hasn’t still been credited to my account! I’ve paid the amount to the credit card company but Spice is definately sure they haven’t recieved the money! Now where did it really go?! This is how corporate customers are handled at Spice Telecom. I’ve been a loyal customer for more than an year and holding two connections and yet this is how I am treated.
Now all this brings me to an interesting question. If those honchos aren’t really working up there, what are they actually doing? May be one of these;

++ Listening to Himesh Reshammiya
++ Sleeping ofcourse!
++ On a vacation somewhere
++ Washing laundry at home

Whatever they may be upto, here’s a small message from me. Wake up guys, wake up! Priyanka Chopra’s looks aren’t helping you. You need to realize that you need to be more attentive to your present customers or else you’ll lose them sooner or later. Wake up morons!