vitamin c. Four easy ways to lose customers

Last year, I bought a Kaspersky single use anti-virus pack for my laptop. I failed to locate the activation code and scratched it away unwittingly. (I didn’t notice any instructions on the pack.) When I sought help, the company’s customer service retrieved it for me in a couple of days. They wanted pictures of the scratch patch, batch number, invoice copy and other such details, which I provided. My mails were answered even on the weekend! I wanted to reward them, so I bought the same product again this year. Now that I knew where the code was, I scraped away the silver paint on the patch gently, yet the paper came off and the first few numbers of the code disappeared. I wasn’t too perturbed. They had handled it efficiently last year, after all, and surely they would help me again. (But really, this flimsy scratch patch seems a most inefficient way to package a product.) By the end of the episode, which I detail below, I had picked up a few tips on what companies can do to lose customers.

I called the numbers listed on the pack but they went nowhere. I searched for their helpline numbers on the internet with no luck. Then I mailed them. The response was slow. I messaged them on Twitter. Somewhere down this string of multi-medium communication, they called me. Their customer service executive would only speak in Hindi, which made communication somewhat difficult. When I meant to tell him the code disappeared I said “ Gazab hogaya !” instead of “ Gayab hogaya !” My intention was certainly not to compliment them.

After a few rounds of phone calls and mails over a week in which I sent them much photographic evidence, I told and reminded them that I had bought their product because of last year’s positive customer service experience. The dealer had changed and for some reason, this was why they were not efficient with their service, they said. Which dealer they were talking about, I did not understand. Then the executive called me and said they would send me a code that would protect my computer for only six months.

This was unacceptable. I had bought a pack that would offer one-year protection. I mailed them back saying that if they were a decent company, they would honour the transaction and give me a full year’s service or reimburse me half the amount I paid for the product. I said they would lose a customer if they did anything less. (I suspect they had already lost one by then.) I asked them to “escalate” the matter — have someone higher up speak to me. They said they would try, but nothing worked, they offered only six months.

One of the mails even said: “Note: It is the customer’s responsibility to securely handle the Activation Code & ensure that it is not lost/misused.” Its tone annoyed me no end. It had come midway through the correspondence, despite my having produced all the evidence the company wanted, and it seemed to me that it was trying to place the blame at my door and wash its hands of the matter.

Further e-mailing resulted in some silence, and upon prodding them, they told me I had to contact the dealer for activation.

I saw this as their bid to get rid of me. I wondered if it really was the dealer’s responsibility. If it had been, why hadn’t Kaspersky told me right away, when I initiated the complaint? I decided to try my luck with the dealer anyway and made a few visits to his store, once to talk to him, then to show him the pack shots (they were on my phone), after which he told me I should bring the pack, he would try and help me but not make any promises.

When I went back with the pack, he was not there, but his colleague, pleasant and smiling, asked me why I had come. One phone call was all it took for him to retrieve my code. “I’ve noticed you coming in here over the last few days. They shouldn’t give you a runaround for something so simple,” he tsk-tsked, handing over the code. Now the dealer has a customer willing to go back and buy, among other things, an anti-virus pack from some other company.

Vitamin C is a weekly dose of consumer empowerment

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