Dish TV's after sales service and customer care are non-existent. A day after installation, the signal vanished. The dealers appeared to have vanished as well, as they refused to answer their phones.

Complaints to dish TV customer care were of no avail, so we stopped payment of the cheque. Even that took three weeks to register! Finally, service was restored and a fresh cheque issued.

Thereafter, the signal has vanished again and despite FIVE complaints and promises of rectification within 48 hours, no one has shown up.

After having surfed the web and found that I am only one among dozens of hapless consumers who have suffered endless aggravation from Dish TV, I am contemplating approaching the consumer court, so that Dish TV is forced to clean up its act once and for all.

Any one who would like the join in the petition, please email.

Dish TV is using all dirty tricks for fleecing the customer. If customer wants to see only free-to-air channels, gradually dish TV starts blocking these channels too for example they have blocked 'Aj Tak' and Star Utsav under the garb of 'signal not available'.

Beware people!

I would like to bring to the kind notice of the board that I have purchased dish t.v. about one and half years back by paying 4200/ rupees and opted for telugu channel package. After one year, I opted for monthly payment of subscription and had paid the same for 3 months. During 3rd month the telecast was stopped without any default from my side. I immediately contacted the dishtv, they informed that their records were not updated and would restore the same within 24 hours. The same was restored after 24 hours. The subscription rates were enhanced and I was never informed of the same. So far, I have not received even a single communication from dishtv either for my bill payment or for any other matter. I got vexed and contacted dishtv and asked them to telecast only free channels, which are mandatory as per the norms of government of India. The free channels were aired for some time and stopped. When contacted they said they told that they would not telecast and spoke to me in a rude manner. I told them I would proceed legally for which they asked me to do whatever I wish to do. I sent a legal notice through my advocate on receipt of which they had started telecasting the free channels. And now, all of a sudden again they have telecasting the same. This is very poor service from Dish Tv in India!

I’ve been looking for fora to share my anguish over Dishtvindia’s service so members are aware of the pitfalls of subscribing to them. In Gurgaon, Haryana, I went to a dealer (Gateway in Supermart) who had advertised about the service, in March 2005 and paid for the hardware and the maxi package for the whole year. On a subsequent call to Dishtv’s call center in Noida, I learnt that the VC provided to me was in someone else’s name – Gateway’s owner promised to get that issue rectified but despite a fair amount of follow-up, that didn’t get done, and call center representatives conveyed inability to change the name no matter what we provided as proof of payment. They simply said that it didn’t matter whose name the VC carried in their records, it was our address and phone numbers they had against it and we needn’t worry beyond receiving channel transmission.

Two weeks ago, though, our channel transmission was discontinued even when our renewal payment made in July 2006 was for the whole year. Initially, the call center representatives pointed towards a lack of payment from the dealer, but for the past 6 days, they just tell us that the service will restart in 24-48 hours, and that is still to happen. The owner of Gateway finds this issue too trivial so doesn’t return our calls, and his johny just tells us that the error has been on Dishtv’s side and our money was indeed transmitted by them. He has provided 2 reference complaint numbers for his calls made to Dishtv but they are no use to me without the channel service.

Granted that there can be gaps in record management, but it’s clear that Dishtv doesn’t have a decent complaint management system. Nor is the company making efforts to manage its ever increasing network of dealers/subdealers/sub-subdealers or customers. It’s going on increasing its customer base by opportunistic advertising without any thought to quality of its service or customer satisfaction -- if some customer rep does decide to do his bit in plugging gaps in my case, it’s anybody’s guess if the company will do anything about several days of shoddy service it put me through.

Jyoti Bhargava.