An Unusual Sort of Customer Care

Dhaval Valia has got a legal notice from Vodafone for Facebook posts about bad service

One columnist has called him “the Anna Hazare of Indian mobile phone users”, but Dhaval Valia only wanted a decent 3G connection. Since then, he has created history of sorts for being the first person in India to get a notice from a telecom company for Facebook posts about bad service.

In mid April, Valia had shifted from Loop to Vodafone using number portability. He had activated 3G services but found that his residence had no connection and the office network was too weak. He complained and began to get bounced around in the customer care department. “One Vodafone employee who came to check the connection said it is fine. But I told the com­pany that he had checked for 2G since the phone he was carrying to test did not have 3G,” he says. More calls, more engineers, yet nothing. Eventually they admitted there was no 3G and it would only get activated by 30 April.

Dhaval says that after he threatened to go to consumer court, Vodafone made amends, waiving off two months of 3G charges. But he then got a call from Vodafone stating that his bill had crossed Rs 11,000. The customer care executive he called “giggled” and told him not to worry. By this time, he had had enough and demand­ed an apology letter. He spoke to different levels of execu­tives, all the way up to the Mumbai CEO and national head of customer service, who told him he could move to another network if he wanted. Dhaval then posted his ordeal on Facebook with the telephone numbers of executives.

That is when Vodafone sent a legal notice asking him to refrain from posting any “false information” in any social networking site otherwise they would initiate civil and criminal proceedings. The move has boomeranged.  The day Open spoke to Dhaval, two TV channels had interviewed him and the next day, The Economic Times wrote about him. Dhaval says his Facebook posts are not only true but also private and in a counter legal notice charges that the company could have hacked into his account. Vodafone declined to comment.

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