Eldeco is at it again

Imagine a brand new housing complex, less than an year old, where residents are charged around Rs. 3000 per month for maintenance service and then what are they provide with:

1. muddy water in the taps
2. seepage in the walls,
3. a fountain which is not even fitted, let alone not working,
4. overflowing drains which are not rectified even after 4 days of complaining, (I have not seen this problem even in 20 year old houses and this building is hardly an year old)
5. street dogs freely roaming in the campus,
6. power backup which takes an eternity to come in action.
7. centralized complaint system, but there is no one to pickup the calls made by residents to make the complaint. And when the poor residents walks down to the office, there is no one there too.
8. Prepaid system for electricity system with an IVR that does not work, so that the helpless residents are not able to know if there is any balance left in their account or not. They have to rely on their memory or wait for the electricity to get cut to know when the account recharge is required.

Can't believe it? Come to Eldeco's Ananda Apartments in Sector 48, Noida and you will get to see all of this and much more.

Eldeco update - Power woes

The residents of Eldeco Ananda have had some meetings with the Eldeco officials in the last few months. One of the issue raised by us was the need of a UPS backup for the EPABX system that has been installed at Ananda.
In the first of such meetings in June Eldeco readily agreed to get this done. The residents have yet to see the UPS working. There was another meeting between the residents and the Eldeco officials on Saturday June 14, 2007, where Eldeco said that the UPS has been commissioned. However at the time of writing this post, there is no electricity in the complex for the last 4 minutes and I tried to check out if the EPABX was working or not and guess what it was NOT working. I wonder where did the UPS go. Seems like it too failed along with the generators for power back up.
While the power was down at Ananda, I couldn't help notice that the lights of the building next door, Kesar Garden Apartments, didn't even blink. I wonder what was the talk about uninterrupted power supply mentioned by Eldeco in their marketing brochure for Ananda. It still seems a distant dream.

Reality of Real Estate In India

The other day I was having an animated chat with one of the employees of Eldeco Properties about some of the complaints that I had. During the course of our chat, I asked him why does he do this job where he has to hear hard words from nearly every customer? And if there is no other option then why don't you ask your superiors to help you resolve the issues faster so that no one would have any complaints from you.
To my utter surprise he said that he loves this part of his job where he gets to hear hard words from his customers. So far so good - no harm in loving some one who is out to abuse you. Remember Mahatma Gandhi. But what surprised me even more was when he said that he in fact welcomes such stuff from his customers. And that this is the reality of the real estate industry in India where the service providers have to hear abuses from the customers. And that every single company in real estate business in India welcomes such abuses.

Now this made me speechless, cause, if someone welcomes the abuses showered on him, to me that means that he does not care about taking corrective action about the reason for which he is being abused.

This made me wonder if that is the reason why in spite of the real estate industry being on the rise, the trust that the public shows in the builders is still very low, and is nowhere near the amount of trust public has in other sectors like automobiles, FMCG, etc. Is this the reason why, baring few, real estate stocks have not been the darling of the stock market till recently.

A concealed threatening from Eldeco

Today we recieved a letter from Mr. Vishal from Eldeco Marketing saying that the maintenance payment that we make to Eldeco for maintaining the "beautiful and wonderful" (pun intended) Ananda residential complex where we live, will now be made part of the "pre-paid" system that is used for track our electricity consumption.

At first it does seem to be a good idea to ensure that regular payments are recieved by Eldeco, but wait till you read the next para of the letter. It says that in case the payment for monthly maintainance is not made then the electricity supply may be disconnected!! That is even when I am regular in paying my electricity dues!!

I wonder if this is due to the comments that I have written on my blog about the pathetic service from Eldeco. But why am I wondering, I should have expected this from them given the kind of people they are.

More on Eldeco

This is what one of the readers have to say about the Eldeco and Ananda, Noida:

The blokes at Eldeco Infrastructure and Properties Ltd, the makers of Eldeco Ananda at Noida, have a way of plumbing to new depths of ineptitude. Case in point? The massive steel tubes that have come up in the basement car park. Who ever wanted them anyway. Even assuming that these barricades serve a purpose i.e. we get disciplined enough to park our cars in a way that enables others to also find their space, these bars could have been a little lower and hence making it possible for people to get out of their cars without fear of banging the door onto these bars.
Someone in Eldeco needs his head examined. Not only is this effort so hopelessly counterproductive and irritating, it has also cost them a tidy packet, with all the fabricating and welding and painting, which amount could have been spent on a better treadmill at the gym.

Customer Satisfaction 101

Recently I learned a new lesson on how to make a dis-satisfied customer satisfied, courtesy the most-intelligent staff of Eldeco.

Long time back we had given a list of complaints to Eldeco. There was no response to the list for quite some time and then all of a sudden recently the Eldeco staff came to review the status of list of complaints. One of the points in the list, was the bad quality of wooden floor that they had put in one of our bedrooms and we had asked for a replacement.
The person who came to us asked us to write a letter to Eldeco mentioning this complaint along with the fact that we are a "satisfied" customer and that this is our only complaint towards Eldeco. And he also quitely suggested that if we show our statisfaction from the services provided by Eldeco it would help him pursue our case with the Eldeco Group's Management and if we don't show our satisfaction then it would be very difficult for him to get things done.

This whole thing shocked us to no end. Imagine the guts of the person saying this. We obviously refused to write such a thing in the letter.

Moral of the Story: The whole episode showed us how to make a dis-satisfied customer, satisfied. Ask him to write a letter saying that he satisfied in case he wants to get his work done.

Postscript: Nice lesson from Eldeco on customer satisfaction, must be put together with the brilliant case study on them which they have been displaying on thier website.

Customer (Non-) Support from Eldeco

We had filed some complaints regarding the finishing of our house when we shifted to Ananda in January 2007. Some of the complaints have been taken care off but most of them have not been taken care off till date. See the portion circled in red in the photo, which has been taken from the complaint register maintained by the Estate Manager at Ananda, Noida. We had filed complaints on 23rd Jan, 2007 and till date some of them have a "not done" status.

I wonder what does Eldeco mean by customer satisfaction, with complaints remaining unanswered for nearly three and half (3.5) months. They do not seem like an progressive organization and are not at all bothered about the customer once they have sold the apartment. The funny part is that they are not even ready to handover the maintanence to the residents even when we have been asking them to do so since last 5-6 months. It seems Eldeco wants to derive some sadistic pleasure from putting us to this misery.

I think even Government of India departments are better performers now. Earlier I was staying in a flat constructed by NOIDA and I used to crib about lack of support from NOIDA, but I think Eldeco has managed to put even NOIDA to shame.