This little pendant I found at Camden Market last year has been a source of some amusement especially when I fly out of Bombay’s international terminal. The CSIA security there are always perplexed by it. This morning the guy asked me if you could touch it. That is unusual for couple of reasons. These security personnel at Indian airports are rarely polite. They all seem to come from the same Haryana villages , where curiosity is often easily replaced with paranoid suspicious. Today’s experience was amusing. Other times they seem to flip out and consult their colleagues as their village brains can’t seem to comprehend this tiny little piece of a motherboard encased in resin. Oh well. 😜🤣 #travel #adventures #indianairportsecurity (at Flughafen München)
On Friday, May 5, 2017 I booked an AC inspection service with Housejoy.in. Job Id : 976872370. You sent your AC “expert” Rehan Shaikh, +91 8286292899. The issue was with low cooling with the split AC in the living room. He did a peripheral inspection and declared the “gas was low”. He then purportedly showed me some meter settings to claim there was no gas at all in the AC. Which is strange, since there was at least some cooling. His so-called meter-reading showed gas level at zero! 🤔
I asked him about the charges. he told me the charges for gas filling were Rs. 2500 for a 1.5ton AC, and Rs 700 for servicing. I was sure it was a 1 ton AC. He insisted it wasn’t and the outside unit was 1.5 ton! I called your customer care to confirm. I was given a quote Rs 100 lower, I asked the technician to make sure it was the gas issue and not any other issue. Remember, he hadn’t even opened the outside unit to actually check anything else. He insisted that was the problem, and proceeded to fill the gas and do some very basic cleaning of the cooling unit.
I was already very suspicious of this man since he did no actual inspection of the AC unit. At this time I trusted Housejoy will not employ a cheat. I grew more suspicious when it time for payment. I told him that I will be paying online. He made some sad noises about it and claimed his phone had stopped working and he couldn’t complete the booking using the app. He basically wanted me to pay him cash. 😠
I called up the customer service and told them about this. The links were generated and I paid online, not trusting this “expert” for a minute. After these so-called “experts” left, the AC worked for barely 2 hours before it stopped cooling altogether. There was, in fact, some cooling before I called your so-called “experts”. Now there was none. I tried to call Housejoy’s customer service. I was astounded to hear the Airtel automated recording telling me Housejoy’s customer care number is invalid!
Next day I tweeted about this and called from another number. I got two callbacks from different people and repeated this story. I was assured someone will get back to me in two hours. Well, nothing since then. 🙄
Growing frustrated with this “expert” service and non-existent customer care I called a local AC technician, trusted by my friends. This is where is gets very interesting. He came, opened the unit and checked everything thoroughly. He found the capacitor wasn’t working properly, causing the condenser to not operate optimally. I told him about Housejoy’s “expert”. He told me in great detail what kind of scam that is. If there was a gas leak, then the Housejoy tech should have also looked for that cause of the leak. The gas doesn’t just evaporate from within the condenser. Oh, and he confirmed this was a 1 ton AC!
So, let’s recap:
Housejoy “expert” lied to me about the AC capacity, and hence I was charged a higher price
His claim of gas leakage was bogus and he “meter-reading” a well-known scam
AC tech didn’t do a thorough job of actually checking the AC to confirm nothing else was the problem, which it seemed would have been obvious if was actually an “expert” and not some low-life scamster
Housejoy doesn’t vet their technicians and cannot be trusted on their professionalism
Housejoy’s customer care is a joke
It is quite obvious Housejoy willfully employs cheats and con-men, especially for their AC service. Housejoy’s customer service is also a joke, since they don’t really care about how their “experts” scam you, or follow up on promises made. Or, in fact, even care that their customer care number is unreachable from Airtel phones.
With the proliferation of these home services startups in India, it seems no lessons have been learned from their peers from the recent past. Have even the investors taken notice? If companies like these continue to operate blind to their serious operational and customer care failures, how long before the little trust that exists in this industry vanishes completely? I don’t mean just the investors. This is primarily a business of building trust between the professionals you claim are experts and the customers. If companies like these can’t make that their priority, then there is little hope these startups will survive much longer. Sad really. 👎
#breakfast at #Suzette after many weeks. Its not breakfast on the beach but it’s #home 😀And some subtle improvements, like the big canopy. Yay. (at Suzette Bandra)
