I was working with an MNC as a senior executive and company had provided me with a postpaid Airtel corporate connection. Recently I changed my job and the SIM was transferred to my name after all the necessary proofs were given to Airtel. This was around the end of september. Airtel staff came for address verification on diwali day and, saw my house locked (I had gone out of town for the festival) and marked the address verification as failed. I fail to understand the idiotic logic behind doing address verification on holidays and festivals. Anyway this was still ok since I was out of town it was my fault. Then on 4th of November, I received a message about the failed address verification and my outgoing facility was cut. On 5th nov, I rushed to the Airtel service centre and gave a re-verification request.

On 7th of November (monday) the verification was done, and after 24 hours the outgoing facility was restored, and I got an SMS confirming the same.

Now the serious part. On 12th November (saturday) evening, my phone was showing "SIM REGISTRATION FAILED". All incoming/outgoing facilities were barred and anyone trying to contact me was getting "Number does not exist". This is horrible customer service. I don't understand how such a thing can be done for corporate customers for no fault of mine, that too without even informing the customer. I was supposed to go out of station yesterday but I had to cancel my plans because of this lack of mobile connection. I am a corporate and I get lots of official calls, sometimes even on weekends. I also run a business and even get calls for business orders. I was being disconnected for apparently no reason, even after everything was verified and restored. What nonsense is this?

I gave a call from my mother's number to 121 and explained the problem. The guy at the customer service said he would reactivate the connection within 4 hours. Today morning, still I get no response. I called again and another representative says the bill address verification status is still not updated, that's why it got disconnected. If this was the case, how come the service got restored last week? I then spoke to some manager incharge and he checked all details, confirmed that there was no problem with address verification now, but it would take 24 hours to activate the connection due to some technical problem in their backend.

Now, I have undergone quite a few losses and even lost a few business calls in this time gap, for no fault of mine. How will Airtel make this up for me?

Going by what I have suffered now, I have 3 actions to take :

1. I will file a case in the consumer court against Airtel for harassing customers without reason this way, and claim for damages caused in loss of business calls. I am serious about this if my problem is not rectified immediately.
2. I will port my number to Vodafone or some other service provider immediately, and will recommend all my friends and relatives to avoid Airtel in future.
3. My company is a huge telecom MNC and has around 10000 postpaid SIMs which it gives for employees, easily generating crores of rupees in monthly bills for airtel. I will explain to HR about the way in which we employees are being harassed, and I will get my company to shift to other service providers which have respect for their customers.