I have been a great fan of Godrej. First of all, I take pride in big Bharatiya (Indian) conglomerates since I want to see many Bharatiya companies of global scale operating in businesses. Why should everything in our house be American, Korean, Japanese or Chinese? And as Bharatiyas, it is our first moral responsibility to buy items made in Bharat (India). Second reason was that one of my best friends and classmate from B-school got his job in Godrej. He won't know it, but after that my affection for Godrej went stronger than earlier.
In one of my earliest childhood memories, I have this photograph of my mother standing in front of White Godrej Refrigerator. In those days, every refrigerator used to be Godrej. Thereafter came Korean brands which started dominating the market with cheaper and more colorful models. I still bought my first refrigerator as Godrej. When it came time to upgrade it, I bought another Godrej refrigerator I liked. I bought it from Tata Cliq.
After the refrigerator was installed by a technician free of cost, he told me that the door-key of the refrigerator was missing. Still, he promised to find one key from the service center and give it to me next day. I followed up in a few days and he said he could not find any spare key.
Now, had he not told me about the missing key, I won't have paid attention to it, since I have never locked the door of my refrigerator. But he had told about its utility - when small kids are in the house, they often open the door to find items from inside and in those times, a key is useful. I imagined my kids doing this for fun and I thought a key would be useful in future. Hence, I called up the Godrej customer care number and registered my complaint. Little did I know what was in store for me next.
I got a phone call from an unknown mobile number, claiming to be from local Godrej service center and he asked whether the refrigerator was defective. He said he would help me replace the refrigerator if it was defective, by talking to the company. First, I did not like the idea of parting with a new beautiful Godrej Refrigerator which had become part of my house. Secondly, he enquired in such a manner as if he was so happy finding a defective piece of appliance and it felt something was wrong; perhaps he was trying to exploit the situation for his own benefit. He asked to take a picture of the sticker inside the refrigerator which mentioned all details about it including serial number etc and send it to him on Whatsapp. Now this was something I was not comfortable with.
I told the person that he should send a technician who can check all the details he wanted to check. He insisted on getting a photograph of label first. I said I did not trust an unknown person calling from a personal mobile number and I won't send details of my refrigerator to an unknown person. The guy sounded offended, and he cut the call. After that, there was no response from Godrej for several days.
I called up the customer care number again and enquired why no one visited or sent me the missing key. The customer care executive tried to avoid telling it but after questioning a bit, she said that there was some problem with the local service center, and they have mentioned something in the logs due to which Godrej will not be able to help me any further on my refrigerator. I was shocked!
I asked to raise a new complaint, but the customer care executive told me that they won't be able to open any new complaint ticket for me now onwards. It was like I was being "shadow banned". I thought about what could have happened. When I declined to send photograph of my refrigerator serial number to the guy, he was offended, and he perhaps wrote something in the records that this customer was abusive and hence I was "banned". But should not someone from Godrej contact me to investigate further? First of all, I was not rude, but I had data-privacy concerns due to which I had declined to share the details on Whataspp of an unknown person. Or was it that Godrej did not have a key to the refrigerator, and they did not want to admit it? The key was not a big problem and had they mentioned that the key had got missing in transit, I would have accepted it and closed my complaint. In their records they would find that I had bought two more appliances before this new purchase and hence I was a repeat customer.
I thought about telling this incident to my friend, but I thought not to make a huge fuss about it. I tried to forget about this incident which happened a few years ago. Still, it remains a puzzle about what happened and why and how could the company do this to any customer.
PS: I have thought about whether I should name the company or not and have gone ahead with mentioning the same, without any motives. I will still buy my next refrigerator from Godrej, because one bad man or incident can't spoil my relationship with a brand.
- Rahul
No comments:
Post a Comment