Wednesday, May 20, 2009

And Some efficient ones

Although I've already written about some (in)efficient companies and also about my mixed experience with large corporations in "The company you keep", now is the time of praise for some deserving ones.

Beginning with the biggest one of them - Hindustan Unilever Ltd. Few months ago, a pack of 100 teabags of HUL's Taj Mahal wasn't being particularly satisfactory due to the continued in-cup tearing of teabags. Amazingly, a single e-mail resulted in a phone call within two days and the delivery of a brand new pack within a week. That was nice to realize - despite the size, volume, and brand, HUL cares about satisfaction of individual consumers.

As another unexpected instance, Cleartrip contacted me in response to a blopost. There was some confusion regarding the refund channel and some detailed communications ensued. Finally I got a refund of more than 2K. But more than that, I've been a loyal customer to Cleartrip since that day for booking all my tickets. At least they are responsive and I know that the company cares in case something goes wrong.

However, the best, and rather surprising, experience was with Kingfisher Airlines. I booked two tickets and when I wanted to cancel one and alter another, they told me, "Since the flight time has been shifted by more than 15 minutes (20 minutes to be precise), we will give you full refund on the cancelled ticket and free rescheduling for another." The real shocker was that they didn't even charge the price difference of over 2000 bucks upon rescheduling. Although one would rate it devoid of business sense, since after this experience, I'm willing to stick to Kingfisher than with any other airlines (specially Spicejet, which really behaves like shrewd and mean businessmen).

P.S. - If you've read the old post (The company you keep), IRCTC is not so bad after all. After the derailment and the whole incident, I got the refund about eight months later. I guess they are not bad or greedy, just lousy.

3 comments:

Chiranjeev Singh said...

HUL really rocks in this case...really awesome...
about cleartrip, when did u start using it? u always said that these sites are just for checking flights...:)
about kingfisher, actually it is a co-incidence that a similar incident had occurred to me also that I wanted to reschedule the flight and because the original flight timing had been changed by 15 min, i was allowed to reschedule without any penalty or any difference of fares, which was substantial...however the only difference was that it was with spicejet...:) i thought spicejet was not too bad...

Sid said...

Not only HUL, I had similar experiences with Nescafe and Nestle as well.
The incident is much older than the present commission charging regime, which made the prices different.
And Spicejet has been good though but for the past sometimes, I suffered. Not only their flights were delayed, they were quite unapologetic and bad host despite long waits at odd hours. By the way, as Spicejet told me, the free rescheduling is done in case of change of 2 hrs or more only and this was across the counter in Delhi this April.

Chiranjeev Singh said...

In my case, the flight was preponed 15 min earlier and i rescheduled it to same day morning flight...(original flight was evening flight..:))...also i had done booking on a special offer of buy one get one free, so i had two tickets for 3300...and when i was rescheduling, there was no scheme...
Now, if you consider these two points, they were really very generous in allowing rescheduling...
there's only one caveat, I had to find the right person to do it....:)
one person refused to do...again i called, some other person picked and did it....:)

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