Customers' service

Ever since my childhood, electricity supply has always been an issue in Santiniketan. The quality of supply, the frequency of power cuts used to make our holidays in Santiniketan ever so romantic. My father, I remember, used to have torches of all shapes and sizes and after dusk, he would never sit down anywhere without the torches near at hand.

When I arrived here to settle down 16 years ago, the situation was pretty much as I remembered from my childhood days. Frequent power cuts and voltage fluctuation were the order of the day. If the power cuts were irritating, the voltage fluctuations were dangerous. The sudden spike in voltage would make me feel as if I was attending a wedding ceremony and the next minute the voltage would drop so low I would feel as if I was in some remote, deprived village. Needless to say this played havoc with all electrical equipment till I became a pro at switching off all things at the hint of fluctuation.

However, over the years I acquired inverters to hook up all fans and bulbs in times of power cuts and the fluctuations reduced. So life became less stressful and more like my years spent in cities. Recently, maybe over the last 10 years (as industries in West Bengal became fewer and fewer), the power cuts were far less frequent and we counted our blessings.

Even when there were power outages thanks to an occasional storm, the redressal mechanism was pretty smooth. We had to call a call centre in Bardhaman (an adjoining district) which would give us a complaint docket number and soon thereafter, a mobile repair van would come by and do the needful.

Over the last month, however, we started to witness power failures on a daily basis. And when we called the Bardhaman call centre (which is now apparently catering to three districts), we would go through all the press-this-for-this-and-that-for-that options and then be told in an American accent that “sorry we can’t take your complaint right now”.

One then tried the online option. After you put in all the details you were sent a one-time password (OTP) upon entering which, you were rewarded with a complaint docket number. But the online option which worked smoothly for a long while suddenly became eccentric and wouldn’t generate an OTP even after a long wait.

Calling the local electricity office was not possible because they had a listed BSNL number which has been pretty temperamental for the last two years. So, in desperation, one had to call the mobile van (our directory of numbers for electricity go-to people was rather long). The mobile van guys who are on contract service would listen rather carefully and then tell you to call the Bardhaman call centre number. “Without an official docket number we cannot help you,” would be their standard reply. The fact that I was calling them only because Bardhaman was not accessible fell on deaf years.

But on one fateful hot day, when the fan stopped whirring, I did succeed in getting a complaint docket number online. I called the mobile van and was assured of their attention to the problem soon. But then the guy on the phone told me “please let me know when your power is restored”. I was so stumped that I said yes and disconnected.

Customers not only have to suffer power cuts and get stressed just to complain about the cut, now we have to tell them when it is restored! Customer is king indeed.