I was holding a postpaid Airtel number in pune for around 4 years which I closed my due to various reasons (The most important one is that I moved to navi mumbai from pune and signals were very week in this region) on 23rd of Jul 2010. For this number I have submitted an amount of Rs. 249 as security deposit. I was informed that I will receive a cheque for my security deposit amount after 45 days of closing the account. Its been around 55 days I have not yet received any such cheque.
I tried to reach out to airtel customer care and the harassment begins.
At first place, Airtel IVR does not have any option for a customer to select when the account is closed. I tried to go via 'non-existing user -> to buy a new airtel connection' and got a chance to talk to there representative, even when I selected English as the communication language the customer care rep talks in Hindi (that too is hopeless :( ). During conversation I was informed that I was connect to Airtel prepaid department even though I dialed postpaid number (pune - 9890012345). Prepaid team dont like to deal with postpaid customers so they simply disconnect. After trying same number for around 10-12 times finally it gets connected to postpaid department and the rep informs that the system is down, they cannot access the information and make a call after an hour. After 1 hours again I had to repeated same process and still the system is down, and this continued for the whole day. Again next day when I repeated the similar process and the system was up the reps were not having any solution to the problem and the simply disconnected the call and this happened for 4 times.
Finally, I decided to drop a mail to customer care services (
[email protected] ) to look into the matter, I received a system generated acknowledgement mail with the reference number for further communication and the message that they will get back in 24 hours. Its been 4 days and I have not received any further communication from airtel.
I have send a reminder mail but still there is no answer. I tried to call them again but its going in same loop. I faced similar problem with one more number of Airtel that I was using around 6 months ago and finally I stopped sending the reminder mails for that number. It seems to be a habit of Airtel, not to return security deposit. I dont know how to escalate it and get my money back from Airtel.