‘Micro’ support, ‘Max’ trouble. Review on Micromax A56

“Are you still talking to me?”, I asked him. “Kya?” he replied as if I was nonexistent. I knew call centre guys were a frustrated lot, but this had gone too far, he was confused, irritated and nervous – the feeling I usually get when I sit for a math paper. But this was not math; this was micromax’s customer care. It had been almost 3 weeks since I had submitted my phone with its warranty documents to an almost nonexistent micromax service centre that was like 10 kilometers away from my home – and located inside a building which was reminiscent of ghost stories my mother told me to keep me from exploring my curiosity. And now I was cursing myself on my insistence on buying this phone even when my brother warned me a couple of times about their customer service. But then, like every Indian I looked at the price tag of a mobile with nice specifications – and the inherent Indian cheapness couldn’t resist, (DISCLAIMER – To all my fellow Indians, I’m not stereotyping us. But yes, it’s a fact. Just take your wives or girlfriends for shopping, you’ll get it)

6 months ago

For a minute I stood still trying to recollect the past few minutes frantically reaching out to all the pockets I had on my body. I tried to run and catch the train that I just alighted from, but it had already gained momentum, I had lost my most prized possession – My first mobile. I was angry, upset and cursed the one who stole it throughout my way back home. After seeing their son in the ‘Devdas’ mode for a week, my parents decided to buy me a new one, but this time they had a budgetary equivalent to India’s investment in science and technology. I had no choice but to choose between a Micromax or a Karbonn mobile. After a lot of research I zeroed into Micromax A56, on the data sheet looked good with specs good enough to serve my purpose and under 6k it was a steal(or so I thought). So finally, I bought it, my second phone – The first mistake of my STORY. First impressions - the display looked great, worked rally well even with a RAM of 256 MB and for its price, it did not feel cheap at all and it could change colours too as it came with differently coloured back panels. Things seemed too rosy, as it always is with the first phase of a relationship.

3 months ago

By this time I had grown attached to my new phone, though there were some problems when played games which were heavy on graphics, the used to get stuck in between which proved to be extremely irritating, maybe it’s just the RAM I thought. I stopped playing such games to conserve battery, but I noticed certain discrepancies in my browsing speed as well, again I thought it might be a network problem, Idea was infamous for its network issues. I changed my network but did not see a significant improvement in my browsing speed. I did not take it seriously then but in a week a so I starting sensing something amiss, I used to lose signal every now and then irrespective of which network I used. I Decided to dig into this issue and find whether others also faced this trouble and to my surprise found many complaints related to the same issue on many consumer forums including mouthshut. I decide to call up the customer care – it happened to be my worst experience with a customer care. Firstly, I called on the number they provided in the support documents but the number was busy all the time and I now know why. After waiting for a long time my call got connected but answers I got was nothing but satisfactory. The guy who picked up seems so disinterested and unhelpful, half of time he did not even understand my problem and he kept saying – “Sir, I am not finding your problem”, it was pretty sure that he was trying to read a script on his screen but couldn’t find a registered problem similar to mine. He forwarded my call to some other department who again passed it to another, It was like playing a game but in this case got more and more irritating and I just hanged up – maybe it was just their tactic to escape the situation. I finally took it to the store I bought it from and got it repaired. I suddenly started to regret my decision to buy it.

1 month ago -

During the course of time many such issues started showing their ugly heads. In just 5 months the phone was riddled with problems, some time with the display, sometimes with the network but the most irritating thing was its battery life. The phone did not even last 6 hours even when I used to fully charge it. But I got the final jolt when the display suddenly stopped working as in the touch itself became unresponsive, I was still in my warranty period and decided to give it to a micromax service centre, but little did I know that the task of finding one would be harder than finding water in a desert. The service centre closest to my home was around 10 kms away and located in a building worse than the worst I had seen till then(which happens to be a session court building), the service centre seemed like a small pan patti ka dukaan, I gave my phone to him, he started scanning it and after 10 minutes he said “Saab, screen badalna padega”, I told him to do it but he told me that it is not possible here and he would be sending it directly to Delhi to get it repaired. I submitted my phone there and it happens to be the last day I have seen it.

2 days ago

I decided to call the customer care to get the status of my device. Surprisingly they picked it soon and told me to give the complaint id but he was talking to someone else on the background, the guy was abusing someone near him and did not care about what I was saying. I hung up the phone and decided to leave my phone to fate and I’m still waiting for its return.