I am still an old school who use web interface on laptop for most of the online transactions. I had been introduced to PayTM an year ago by my friend Ashish and had been occasionally recharging my phone through it. I find it easy to use, especially the Fast forward option that cuts the crap and straight takes me to the payment option. It’s a 2 minutes job to recharge a phone. In past I had also used Tata docomo website (I use Tata prepaid) to recharge my phone and I find it as smooth as Paytm.
This time when I recharged my phone through Paytm I opted for Rs330 talktime for which I need to pay Rs 310 (as shown in the snapshot below). I chose the fast forward option, paid Rs310 and got the credit of Rs 290.7 WHAAAAAAT?!? Only Rs 290.7 what happened to the Extra Talktime of Rs330 which is mentioned on Paytm website. What I got is Rs 39.30 less than what is published on payTM website.
I immediately wrote a complaint on Paytm website to which I got a reply after 36 hours (which to me only means that of late Paytm is getting more complaints than they are prepared to handle). I am posting their reply here.
I find it very surprising to get such a lame reply from a company who claims to be $1.5billion in valuations. It appears that paytm customer care team (which as per the email “looks forward to see me again” and gives me “best wishes” before signing off) hadn’t even looked at what they are responding to.
I didn’t expected such a neglecting reply in which paytm claims to accept this false discount propaganda (which they call technical problem) and closes the issues calling it “resolved”. WHAAAAAAT ?!? I wouldn’t be surprised if Paytm had responded with the exact same mundane reply to its other disappointed customers who had fallen into such recharging traps.
Is Paytm also one of those ecommerce sites where, as long as the transactions are clean its customers can call themselves lucky but if they caught themselves into false claim they should just call it a bad experience and move on……..”Technical problem”???
I have heard that flipkart had also offered false discounts to please more customers and once the purchase has been made they didn’t entertain those discounts. It might be that the same flipkart learning is spearing across the ecommerce space and Paytm is one of the first few to get onboard.
These billion dollar companies who enter the web space on the promise of delivering a better service quality and pleasant experience to its consumers, overtime turn themselves into cheats who abuse their large consumer space where disappointment of a few like me gets neglected. I wouldn’t be surprised if Paytm like other traditional corporate houses, segments its consumers based on their monthly or quarterly purchase. Attention of its customer care is then directed only to those customers who really matters, those who purchase stuff only once or of smaller ticket size gets neglected. After all these companies are built to generate profit which doesn’t come from floating large discounts.
Now I am left with two options – just stay silent and forget about Rs 39.30 which by any standard is a small amount or to write about the bad practices which Paytm is following. Who knows there have been 1000s or 10,000s of people who are losing such small amount regularly and staying silent.
As I am from a finance background I know the real importance of this money which straightaway boosts the bottom line of a company, which in turn results into large valuations helping to raise real money in future or get higher stock gains. In this particular case Paytm made an extra Rs39.30 on the sale of Rs310 which is 12.6% higher gain, such small gains if made regularly can boost a company’s valuation multiple folds but what about my disappoint and the written promise of Extra Talktime?????
I would be waiting to hear from Paytm what explanation do they have for this screw-up.
Thank You
Gordhan Singh
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Paytm resolves my issue
April 16, 5:15 PM
While my friend Ashish & I both tweeted to Paytm, it took them sometime to notice us. Only when Ashish tweeted to them again today, we heard back from Paytm
Immediately after the tweet, I got a call from Paytm & the money landed in my account shortly.
Thank you Paytm. Please do let us know what you doing to rectify your support. I had a word with Ashish too & he agreed that offlate the quality of Paytm support emails have degraded substantially. We would like to hear how you are taking care of the problem. Mind dropping a comment ?