"LIKE" If You Have Been F**ked By Astro or Maxis!

No Copyright Infringement Intended.
Just to prove your service is as cold and mechanical as your corporate logo.

Dear Astro, Maxis and All Other Service Providers,

In case your respective marketing departments failed in their duty to remind you that the fastest growing segment of your customer base is the young working adults, allow me to volunteer my pro-bono consultative advice.

Briefly, the profile of this emerging segment of customers are as follows:

1. They have just recently joined the work force, and with competition among peers being how it is today, they have no choice but to work long hours in the office with minimal opportunities to take leave of absence from work.
2. They have just recently bought a house/apartment in a fringe part of the city, and yet spend very little time in their house/apartment since they have to work aforementioned long hours to support the crushing volume of debt & interest payment.
3. If they are co-habitating or married, chances are both parties are working full time jobs, and are rarely home.
4. As immigrants to the city, many young adults do not have immediate family members in close proximity who can chip in when it comes to running errands.

Understanding the above would then assist in crafting policies and practices governing customer service and interaction in a way that doesn't awaken your customer's Icarian instinct to fly out of the 9th floor of a high rise building.

Do not, for instance:

• Make your young adult customers wait on the phone for too long - Their bosses really hate it when employees are not seen to be typing furiously on their laptops but instead have a mobile phone sandwiched between their ears and palms, while in the office.
• Restrict the times your technicians can make house calls. Although I understand that there are security concerns that should be considered, many of your customers cannot take half a day off just to wait for the technician who agrees to come anytime between 1 p.m. and next year's Christmas. It would be great if we can welcome the technicians to our houses after official office working hours or during the weekends.
• Pass the customers' call to ten different departments. Your customers do not enjoy repeating his name, identification card number, mother's maiden name, mode of last bill payment, pet dog's birth date, etc for ten times just to pass the verification test.
• Promise to call back within 48 hours, and then don't call back within those said hours. Your average Malaysian, a product of a very successful national education policy, have been taught to count up to fifty, and since they can afford your grossly priced services, most can probably also afford a watch/clock to keep track of time lapse.
• Force your customers to pay a visit to your headquarters or your branches for services that could have easily been given over the phone. The effort to find an available parking bay is usually given up quickly and replaced by double parking and risk of traffic citations. Again, your customers do not like to utilise their annual leave just to spend it swapping his office for yours
• Charge your customers for service downtime that is not their fault, then make them jump through hoops for them to request (or more appropriately, demand) a waiver of said charges.

In my case, as a member of the young working adult segment, I have suffered all of the above throughout the years since I moved out from my parents' house, but my recent attempts to install Astro's satellite television service takes the cake.

I had registered for an Astro account more in early May.

After 2 weeks, the appointed Astro installer, an external agent of the company, failed to return my call to provide me with an update. I had to personally make the necessary calls to the Astro headquarters, one thing that the agent should have performed as part of his responsibilities.

His first attempt at installation was unsuccessful due to what he claimed was a faulty decoder. He did, however, succeed in detaching the cable hook from my one month old television set and mistakenly attach it to the wall (instead of the television) causing the paint on my wall to peel.

His second attempt came three days after the first, although he had promised to return with a new decoder the immediate following evening. This time, he did not even turn up personally, instead sending an obviously inexperienced worker to perform the installation. I was told, after I have paid the full installation cost, that the service would commence two hours after installation.

Well, two hours came and pass, and there were still no "How I Met Your Mother: Season Six" showing on my modestly sized television screen.

After wasting a considerable amount of time and phone expenses (which ironically, goes to Maxis, my mobile service provider, a company owned by the same people who owns Astro) with the said installer trying to troubleshoot the problem, he practically gave up and asked me to call Astro directly for technical assistance.

At that point I gave up on him too.

I promptly called Astro the following morning, and after being given the usual drivel of "we have raised a report and our Technical Department will contact you within forty-eight hours", I told myself that, well, at least the experts whose employment is paid for by Astro directly is now looking into my predicament.

I shouldn't have got my hopes artificially inflated.

Forty-eight hours later, there was still no call from Astro's technical department. Being the adult in this situation, I proceeded to call their hot line to gently remind them that I wasn't yet deceased.

The nice lady who answered my call informed me that my report have already been transferred to the Technical Department, and that a technician have been assigned to my case, and should be calling me shortly. I politely asked for the technician's direct phone number, and she was kind enough to acquiesce to my request.

It was the number of the same Astro installer who had failed twice in installing the service, the one who gave up and had me contacting Astro directly.

Really? No wonder he did not want to call me within those forty-eight hours.

This was how I looked after she gave me the mobile number.

In an ideal world where monopoly does not exist and competition among business enterprises drives service quality up and keep prices manageable for consumers, complaints like mine will not be as prevalent. However, such a reality is not available to us Malaysians, so we resort to raising our grievances to faceless soulless corporations owned by well-connected multi-billionaires who pays minimum wages for poor customer service officers to courageously face the angry disgruntled customers.

As for me, I would like to think that I've maintained my composure and courtesy thus far without compromising on assertiveness, so I'll continue waiting patiently but at the same time keep an eye on the clock while my monopolistic service provider behemoths try to sort my problem out.

Still, getting f**ked by huge corporations leaves me crying in pain and shame.