This is my complaint againsts Indus Net Technologies
Abhishek Rungta – CEO, Founder
[email protected]
Jitesh Purkait – seems like he is his right hand man
[email protected]
They claim they are “Rated #1 IT SME in India – 2008 by Dun & Bradstreet“
http://www.indusnet.co.in
http://www.indusnet.co.in/blog/
http://www.hire-a-designer.com
http://www.hire-a-content-writer.com
So I made the mistake of thinking maybe this Indian company was different then ALL the other East Indian companies or independent contractors I’ve NOT had the pleasure of dealing with.
Here is what happened:
I wrote to them a few times, & never heard back, so I wrote on their blog on 01-26-09:
“Well I tried to do biz with you guys & to me you are very unprofessional.
I’m sure this post will be blocked.
I spoke to 2 separate people. I was passed to the 2nd, he said he would find me 2 other people & we’d go through the designs to find the graphic web designers I wanted & I never heard back from him again. It shouldn’t take more than 2-3 days to find me a suitable website coder, programmer & graphic web designer, not if you really have a team & are streamlined & run your business well.
Even if there was a hiccup, the potential client should be told what is going on, not left hanging.
He only e-mailed me once per day (this is NOT enough for me, I even asked for his working hours in EST & he didn’t respond back) & when I said if I don’t hear back from you by Monday (today), forget it, I don’t do business this way, he disappeared.
I will be placing your company on my blog to warn others.
Oh & I also tried to call your UK # today & no one even answered the phone & it sounded like a private person’s answering machine, NOT a company.
Very disappointed.
Michelle”
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That is when I started dealing with Abhishek Rungta, the owner. He read my post, & rest assured me that he wants my business, & that some of his staff wasn’t following up on e-mails so they booted them.
I thought he was talking about Jitesh, but I was wrong.
Abhishek said that things would be different now, & he specifically asked me how much work there was going to be.
I was very clear in explaining that we are a small company & we had this amount of work now (I listed everything off to him) from a graphic web designer, a website coder & a programmer, but there would be more work in the future.
I received a quick response from Jitesh, so I was happy (for the moment).
Things once again went downhill very quickly.
- Jitesh wouldn’t IM me through Yahoo like I asked. I had wanted to go through their portfolio & find out which graphic web designers I liked. First he sends me some designer who’s work was sub par. I had to get stern with him because it was clear he didn’t understand much of what I was saying. I cced Abhishek on that issue as I wanted to keep Abhishek up-to-date thinking that the owner of the company would care about the quality of work/communication that was going on. I later found out he doesn’t care.
- 3-4 days after I had waited & waited for Jitesh to e-mail me to set up a date & time, or for him to just IM me, I finally resorted to complaining to Abhishek asking for someone else.That’s when all of a sudden I get an IM from Jitesh. He claims (I believed him at the time, but I no longer believe him) that he tried to IM me 2-3 times, but I never responded.I thought it was a connection problem on his end because clearly I never received any IM, but based on how the relationship continued, he was probably lying. That is my opinion.We eventually did go through the designers & I narrowed it down to 3 I wanted.
- I would continue to e-mail Jitesh & make comments or ask questions & in almost every e-mail he’d miss addressing everything. This happened around 3 times in the spam of 3 days.I told him that I can’t keep repeating myself 2-3 times. I even cced Abhishek to show him I was having more problems communicating with Jitesh.
Looking back on the e-mails now, it seems most of what I would get from Jitesh was some sales pitch type response, or his responses seemed VERY robotic.
- I was also looking for a website coder & a PHP programmer.They sent me a website coder who’s code was good, but when I asked Jitesh to have the guy fill out our online application, the guy didn’t even bother to read it over.I told Jitesh that for this reason I can’t hire him. When I asked for someone else, Jitesh said he had no one else.
- I did get the programmer’s code examined & was told it was good, so I was this close to finalizing everything with them in regards to hiring their programmer & their graphic web designer, when once again Jitesh ignores one of my questions.Not only that, we had already settled on a price for each design & he started trying to ask me for 10 hours of money upfront.I’ve heard of these East Indian companies who rip customers off. They even have a name for it, but I can’t find it right now. Another East Indian actually confirmed that in India they have a name for this.I was VERY upset with the snail’s pace this was going. Not only were things delayed because of the difference in hours which I was able to deal with, but having to repeat myself over & over again was too much for my patience.Also I would be online when I was told they were open, yet it would take forever for Jitesh to get back to my e-mails. I would get maybe 1-2 e-mails per day if that.
So I wrote to Abhishek on February 2nd, 2009 & told him I want someone else to replace Jitesh as the PM. Instead of Abhishek doing that, he just got Jitesh to e-mail me again & be a little quicker.
Then yesterday I had enough. It was like 4 am here & Jitesh still hadn’t written me, so I IMed him.
I complained to him that he was taking way too long.
So his solution was to ignore what I said. Then his English was so difficult to understand I had to correct him on it because I really had no clue what he was saying. That took about 15 minutes for me to figure out what he “meant” to say.
He was trying to tell me that he was in the process of e-mailing me.
Do you know how long that e-mail took to get to me?
About an hour, & it consisted of maybe 4 lines of text. How slow does he type?
Back while I was trying to figure out what Jitesh was trying to say via IM, I IMed Jitesh again saying HELLOOOOO. I’m literally sitting there in the middle of IMing with him & he’s not saying anything. His response was “yes”.
Oh god I was furious at this point.
So I e-mailed Abhishek & said if you want my business, you will give me someone else who understands English & doesn’t ignore people.
Instead of Abhishek caring about me as a potential client, he e-mails me today & tells me “I spoke to my team. It seems they the relationship is just not working. They feel that you are very demanding and it is not feasible for them to invest the time and effort for the volume of work that you have for us. It seems you are looking to deal with freelancers and the process that is used to work with freelancers may not work when you are dealing with a company. Again this is only an assumption.”
First of all there was NO TEAM. Jitesh is ONE PERSON.
I don’t care if I’m dealing with one independent contractor, or a company, my expectations of swift, understandble communication is the same for everyone.
So Abhishek tries to blame me for being too demanding because I guess working at a normal business pace & expecting proper English skills is tooooo demanding for Indus Net Technologies.
When I work with people, I expect more than one e-mail back per day, & I certainly DON’T expect it to take 2 weeks to set something up so we can get down to work.
I’m also told that because I won’t be giving them TONS of work (they have no idea how much work I would have eventually given them, because I don’t even have the answer to that question & we are a growing company), we aren’t worth their time.
Well Abhishek YOU should have told me that right upfront that if we aren’t a HUGE company, you don’t want to work with us. Instead, you wasted my precious time. My time is worth money to me & both you & Jitesh just wasted it. You also wasted my assistant’s time & my programmer’s time, because they were involved in screening your staff’s code.
Then he blames culture as another reason.
No, I don’t think this has anything to do with culture, this has to do with someone understanding the English language & responding back to e-mails in a very timely manner.
This is IT, I will NEVER deal with East Indians again.
They are one of THE most difficult people to deal with & that’s of course including when I have to deal with them by calling up some American or Canadian company that uses them for outsourcing.
I thought Indus Net Technologies was different because they were a larger company, but obviously I was wrong.
So, hire at your own risk.
Michelle
Hi Michelle,
Thank you for putting up the complain in public without caring for privacy. So I will respond it in public.
1) You are not our customer, since you never bought any service from us. You sent us an inquiry, and after some discussion we felt that you are not the right sort of customer for us and we decided not to do business with you. It is that simple.
2) We serve 5000+ businesses from all over the world at the last count and that too from all over the world. We do know how outsourcing works.
I am not sure if you have successfully worked with outsourcing companies in past or not? It seems you were more interested in working with a freelancer and your work process / response time requirement was in those lines. It is best that you work with freelancers!
3) I hate to say this, but I do not like someone making ‘generalist’ statements. If you cheat me, I will not say that all Americans are bad! Your generalist statements paint a very nasty picture of yours. Please refrain from that in your own interest.
4) I said that there is a mismatch since,
> We do not work on such small deals
> We do not work on IM all the time like freelancers
> Our employees do not fill up those forms!
Being in business, I have my right to choose my clients who respect the dignity, process and business objective of our company.
I am sure, you wrote this out of your busy schedule and you must have written this because you are angry. I am sorry if I have hurt you or anybody at our company has hurt you. But we do not want to do business with you. This is good for both of us.
Regards
Abhishek Rungta
It’s a shame that you think ONLY customers should be treated with respect. How you get any business at all if you treat all potential clients this way is beyond me.
I know you don’t want our business, you made that very clear based on how terribly you treated us which is WHY I wrote this post. I didn’t write this post because you rejected me, of course every business has the right to reject a potential client.
Had you only been open & honest from the getgo, you would never have ended up on this blog, but you didn’t tell me any of the things you are now conveniently stating in your response to my complaint.
I call your response what it is, a bunch of lies in order to defend yourself and make yourself look bigger and better than you actually are.
As for my general statements about East Indians, I’ve found my statements to be true 99% of the time unless the person grew up or has lived in North America for a long time. Oh, and East Indians lie ALL the time. That’s a known fact, which is why banks won’t give them merchant accounts because it’s one of THE scammiest countries in the world.
I stand by my statements in my original post.
Michelle