ACT Broadband - Wrongful charge and account disconnection

Hello,
My name is Deepak Pakhare and I am a resident of Bangalore. I’d like to file a complaint for wrongful charge and arbitrary account disconnection against ACT Fibernet in Bangalore.

In June ****, after being fed up of almost a month of outage and service disruption, I changed my ISP from Spectranet to ACT Fibernet for my home broadband connection. It was a clear case of “From the frying pan into the fire”

I initially subscribed to ACT’s broadband package called “ACT Storm **M + *M” which allows for payment of ** months advance fees and * month’s worth of data free. The next day I emailed them a request for changing the package to “ACT Storm Entertainment with FREE Wifi Router”. I had already paid the full ** months rental in advance.

I changed the package because this package offered a free Wifi router instead of * months free data which I preferred. The ACT executives confirmed that there will be no difference in the advance fees between the * packages. Then ACT took almost a week’s time to change the package during which I had to constantly follow up with them. Finally my account was created and the connection was established. I did not face any major issues in the last * months that I have used their service until last week. Last week while I was traveling abroad for work, I received an SMS that my account is disconnected due to non-payment of ₹**** as wifi-router fees. I was surprised and confused because the router came free with the package!

In the * instances that we have had to contact ACT’s customer care, during the package change in June and in the last * days for inquiries about the wrongful charge and random disconnection, me and wife have had the most unfortunate and deeply frustrating experience. Every time we called their customer care number:
*. We had to wait for anywhere between *-** minutes to get connected to one of their customer care executive incurring us a substantial cost in call-time.
*. Almost every call got dropped without completing the query redressal.
*. Every time we called again, it was a different agent and we had to explain the issue all over again
*. Every time we completed a call, the issue was marked as closed without any resolution and we got an email and SMS notification for the same.
*. Because the issue never got resolved, we had to re-open the ticket over and over again and repeat the whole process.
*. The customer care agents refused to call back if the call dropped.

The ACT customer care acknowledged that the ₹**** as wifi-router fees is a wrongful charge and will be reversed in the next * days. We were also assured that the connection will be restored within **-** minutes. It’s been * days, the connection is still not up.

I assume the connection will be restored eventually, what I’d like to highlight in this complaint are the * points I mentioned above where it is the mental stress we as customers have to undergo every time we interact with ACT customer care. Their customer care systems and processes are completely broken. Internally, the teams are not integrated. As was proved in my case, the customer support team did not know that the billing team has wrongfully charged me. The billing team was unaware that I had changed my package to include a free router etc.

The above instance generally highlights the apathy large telcos have towards paying customers. Subs-standard service including borderline unethical practices is unfortunately no cause for concern for leaders of organisations like ACT who seem to be focussed on customer-acquisition alone. Once acquired, customers are left at the mercy of inefficient and unprofessional customer care teams.

Best,
Deepak Pakhare