They should learn the basics of marketing and customer attraction…

During the last couple of weeks we faced enormous difficulties when dealing with local service providers. During their marketing campaigns (especially on TV commercials and paper advertisements) they do boast about their end services. But reality is far away from the advertisements.

I’ll give few examples for your reference.

1. One mobile phone company is using a slogan of “Future Today”. But in real world they can not provide their customers the on time service due to ancient technologies in placed. Followings are among the few excuses they are giving to their customers.

• Our server got crashed therefore can not process this request now. We’ll try this on tomorrow.
• We do have a long queue on our server; we do not have a mechanism to prioritize the jobs on queue. It’ll take a day or two to process the job.
• We do not trust our customers therefore we do deactivate services when their outstanding exceed the deposit.
• He is having an abnormal talent and he is a genius. It enough for him to touch a device to heal the issue. (:D this is what mentioned by one of their customer care executives)

2. One communication provider says that they do have backups in heaven. In real they take years to give their customers a new connection. Their rates are among the one of the highest in the region. Its essential bribe them in-order to get a service else we have to force from the top.

This is a common practice in this island I guess. No matter what the company type is (privately held or a government institute) they do inherit these. The real joke is managers at a one communication company want their customers to call them and remind about the mails send weeks ago. Else they won’t notice about the client’s requests sometimes they might not using it.

I have a one advice for you all, in Sri Lanka do not use the e-mail addresses displayed in web sites (web sites published by the Sri Lankan companies, especially SLT, Dialog). You won’t get a reply from the other end for years.