NEW DELHI: Subscribers to Tata Sky's Direct to Home (DTH) service
across the country say they're fed up of no signal message on their television
sets instead of actual channel transmission. Anger against the service provider
by those who've missed out on cricket and football matches, news and daily
soaps, has been spilling out on social networking websites. Hashtag
#TataSkyDead was one of the most trending Twitter topics over the weekend. On
the service provider's Facebook pages, angry customers have reacted with
sarcasm and in some cases downright abuse.
Disruption in services have been
reported from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Bhopal, Jaipur among others
cities across the country. Problems for Tata Sky's customers are as varied at
their locations. Some customers have reported a partial loss of channels, some
say they are looking at completely blank screens. Regional channel packs have
been lost on some television sets and some have lost High Definition (HD)
channel packs. Top officials of the company say the disruptions are part of an
upgrade.
"The current upgrade process
that we commenced two weeks back was paused and now timed to complete during
the short window between World Cup and upcoming IPL. A few thousand subscribers
are likely to be impacted across the country from the base of over 1 crore. In
fact Tata Sky proactively informed the subscribers about where to go and what
to do across our platforms," said Harit Nagpal, MD & CEO, Tata Sky.He
added that company's field service personnel are attending five times more
calls versus a normal day and that within the next two days they'll be visiting
the last impacted customer.
Customers of the DTH service
however claim that the company's grievance redressal mechanism was non
responsive. It was five days ago that almost all the channels went blank on
Harsha Vardhan's television set, he claims nobody's come to visit his place yet
despite his attempts to reach out to the company through every possible
platform. "My experience has been quite frustrating. Calls to service desk
don't get through, SMS help line doesn't work, and Twitter help desk is
useless. I pay a premium price of around 600 per month and this is how they
treat us. As icing on the cake they sent an SMS yesterday indicating prices of
channel packs are being increased," said Harsha Vardhan, from Bangalore.
Bhargavi V Raman, home maker
based out of Bengaluru is finding it hard to kill time during evening for the
past fortnight. "It is boring to have a television at home and seeing a
black screen that just asks me pay the monthly bill. Despite repeated
complaints, the Tata Sky cable operator in the locality says it is an internal
problem and will get sorted out in some time," she said.
What has irked many customers is
how the service provider continues to telecast an advertisement on its home
screen asking people not to worry. The advertisement suggests that those who're
facing troubles with their service can give a ring or leave a message to their
customer service number, to which service provider's executives will respond
promptly. Varun Sharma based out of Delhi pays extra, about Rs 800 per month,
to Tata Sky just to watch HD quality sports channels, which he isn't receiving
on his television set since last Saturday. Several missed calls and SMSes later
still nobody's come to fix his issue.
"I've tried to contact them
repeatedly however nobody's responded from their end. I found it very funny as
well as very stupid that when their customer fails to pay on time they don't
hesitate to shut down their service, yet when the same logic is applied to
them, their reply is just sorry," said Sharma.
While top Tata Sky officials
claim that the large scale disruptions caused by their recent upgrade has
started about four to five days ago, customers of the service from various
cities claim to have been affected for far longer. Kshitija Awate of Pune said
her problems with TataSky have been happening since the last 10-12 days.
"I am not able to view any channel of the Zee network. It is particularly
the Zee Marathi channel which I am missing the most. I called to complain but
was told that the problem is because of climate change. I was assured a visit
by a company technician, but I am still waiting for him."
No comments:
Post a Comment