I think against that. What i think is there should be a retention dept. but should not have principle like the guys working with airtel have.
Retention Dept should call customer only once that too to get the reason for the disconnection. If the problem is rectifiable then it should be attended on highest priority and be rectified within time frame of 24hrs flat. Otherwise they should just take the customer feedback and do not trouble them by selling other backend plans.
Retention should never give you other plans or offers it should just take your feedback and if possible get the problem rectified in 24hrs or just let the customer go
Of course when you're disconnecting we'll ask why anyway, but chances are that if you're disconnecting your connection, it's because the service and other support options have already failed you. Basically, it shouldn't come to that.
On the surface yes, it seems like the retention department in Airtel is pretty much just a discount centre, and even then, if I'm to believe what I read here on IBF, the discounts usually turn out to be temporary anyway. I don't really think that this is a good
business strategy and the problem still isn't solved at the end of the day.
What you're basically suggesting though seems more like a "last resort" help desk - again, problems shouldn't get to that level to begin with! Yes, there will be some dissatisfied customers and some customers will migrate away, but at the very least our CSRs should insist on making notes so that anyone accessing your file (including yourself through your account page on our website) knows what the status is, and it should be mandatory for our CSRs to give a valid reason to close a support ticket - this should be made even more clear to the CSRs since you would be able to read what they're jotting down once the ticket is submitted or status changed.
Perhaps also a policy similar to "if you don't get a receipt, consider it complimentary" should be implemented here - if you don't get a support ticket number then you should be compensated in some way - a 25% discount or something.
As for the 24 hours thing, yes, that would be nice - but in some cases it may not be possible for some reason or another (catastrophic failure somewhere or who knows what), although we should endeavour to give cases priority according to how urgent the problem actually is and have time frames to fit each priority accordingly: priority 1 could be 6 hours, priority 2 could be 12, priority 3 (default) could be 24, priority 4 could be 48 & priority 5 could be 1 week.
As yet I'm not entirely sure how easy it would be to keep to such a schedule in the real world once we have over 1 lakh customers - maybe it's easy, maybe it's damn-near impossible.
1st Airtel, 2nd Reliance, 3rd MTNL