Maxis oh maxis

I used to love being a Maxis phone user. When I started using Maxis in 1999 the customer care service was excellent. I used to call the 123 hotline if I had any problems with my number and the service was very prompt.

Well, they say things have to change and with Maxis Hotline it turned for the worse.

I sort of 'lost' my phone today. And being paranoid, i suspended my line. IT took me 4 phone calls to get through for my 1st encounter with the Hotline.

An hour after that, my medical officer came and returned my my phone. She saw it lying on my desk and fearing that someone may steal it (though I can't imagine anyone who wants to steal that less than RM100 Nokia phone) she took it for safe keeping.

That's when my nightmare began.

Using my love's phone (he has a hotlink number) I dialed 123. A lovely automated voice answered. Apparently, one cannot access the 123 hotline from a prepaid number and thus the voice instructed me to dial 1300820120

I complied and within two rings the phone was answered by a customer care consultant. I thought well, this is great! I am impressed! Very fast! The nice man heard my problems and nicely told me that the hotline is 'only for pre-paid customers' as he is from the Pre-Paid Department. So he advised me to call 1800821123.

Thinking, "yeah soon my woes would be over" I quickly dialled the said number. The Voive again answered "Thank you for calling Maxis.... if you wish me to talk in Bahasa Malaysia please press One....". Being a supporter of the Bahasa Kebangsaan I chose Option One. I was listening very hard for the subsequent options and after a while I got utterly confused. I kept coming to the end of the menu and there was no usual option of "talking to a customer care consultant". I thought that perhaps my Malay must really suck as i couldn't even decipher words that means "customer care consultant" in Malay and thus keep missing the option. Damn.

So I decided to switch to English.... and again the same thing. Double damn! I finally figured out that the Maxis Hotline must have a switchboard that automatically directs a prepaid number to the prepaid menu.

I was scratching my head. This was a huge problem. I am oncall tomorrow and I need my phone to be in working order. What to do? What to do? What to do?

I need to talk to a REAL person! Ah... try again lah the 1300 xxx xxx number, at least they have a LIVE REAL person. I again had to explain the bad luck that befell me and how i just couldn't get through their Maxis post paid counterpart. i must have sounded pathetic as he offered to call the other department and get them to call me back.

Ahhhhh...finally. And after missing two episodes of Teen Titans (dratts...) I managed to get my phone working again.Phew....

I MUST SAY, MAXIS CUSTOMER CARE HOTLINE SYSTEM SUCKS!!! The only consolation is they have pleasant and helpful customer care consultants. This is NOT the way to go Maxis!