Friday, August 23, 2013

Be a little ALERT and AWARE before you enroll for memberships at Club Mahindra

Be a little ALERT and AWARE before you enroll for memberships:

I was quite keen on getting a membership so one of the call person set up a meeting for me with the sales executive of club mahindra.


 7th June 2013 :

 The meeting seemed all fine and advance was also paid for a membership of my choice and my offer was blocked as well. What followed after that was something i did not enroll for. But for some reason that meeting left me with a vibe that i should not go for it and i decided to call the agent and ask for a money back that i handed in cash. He seemed ok with it and said he was out of town and will get back to me in a couple of days. Since i did not get any revert i tried getting in touch again but he seemed to not respond. Then what followed was the chain of "the number you have called is switched off" , "unreachable", and so on... again i tried after some days and he said he is out of town. Well i tried of understand and waited for two months. At a point i called him for like 10 mins straight but he just wouldn't pick up my line. I got put off and decided to send a feedback to club mahindra.



 August 2013:

 To my surprise i did not see any kind of customer grievance or feedback or complaint section on their website. Its was more than two months now from the time i took the membership. It displeased to see that they cared so much before i bought the membership and after that not a call for follow up. Nevertheless i contacted their corporate office and again there wasn't any section where i could official give my feedback or complaints. Within a couple of hours i was set up with a point of contact and this was taken forward. I learnt that the sales executive was absconding since july.

The person incharge contacted the sales executive and threatened that if he wouldn't return the money they would file a complaint. The sales executive immediately started bombarding me with calls and messages. I was uncomfortable and din respond to his calls. After a lot of irritating and uncomfortable situations the Head person met me in person handed over my money and apologised. It was a good gesture. And i appreciate. Now i started questioning that how can you send someone to anybodys place and not follow up with the client? The person had explaination to question i asked but not all were satisfactory. They do have pretty big shot clients which he did try and advertise every now and then. Din really like the feel of it especially when you are at the receiving end.

But my simple QUESTION to him was what do you do to people like us who go through inconvenience for more than two and because of an error at club mahindra's end?

"Mam we apologise in person. We cannot change the whole system. At the end there is risk involved" That was the answer. So at the end there is no accountability and peaceful assurance. There wasn't any gesture that made me feel that they wanted to make up for something like that.

May be the whole consumer system in INDIA functions in a way that 'its OK and a sorry is enough to get rid of a situation like this'. Even the fact that when this incident happened he was officially an employee of club mahindra did not make much of a difference.  I'm not sure what a customer in US or any other western country would have done.

May be at this point "mam what can we do to make up to you" would sound like a paid luxury to me.
I might try and take up a membership later in life but not immediately for sure.

Do suggest.

Thanks