16 February 2012

A Journey thus began -My Journey with Redbus as a user

I love startups, through out my career if there is some one who made me understand the creation of brand,process and building an organisation leaving what is called "Well Paid, Secure Job" and the Ups,Downs and extreme excitement of building something I attribute it to Karthik K of Ogive.

I think its destined for me to be an entreprenuer, though I did not know in the beginning of my journey that I will, atleast so soon. Its so challenging,exciting for the reasons far from business, Its value creation, continues learning and getting a chance to work with wonderful people.

So when I saw Redbus Fastcompany 50 Innovative Comanies list I was thrilled, but not surprised as my experience started with Redbus precisely on 22 Feb 2007. I interacted with them on chat support for my failed transaction, then they immediately got back to me with ticket with which I travelled, but had a bad first experience So I sent the following mail to those guys

Redbus-office

worst service
1 message

Vasundhar <bvasundhar@gmail.com>

Thu, Mar 1, 2007 at 17:48

Hi

I booked a ticket from Chennai to Bangalore on last sunday ie 24 Feb 2007 for 10:45 PM bus of sharma travels,
the ticket number mentioned in my ticket was 23 and the same ticket was given to 3 more people.
finally your phones were all dead and the server was down when I tried to reach you by mail from there.

Finally we managed to board the bus only because the travel agent took responsibility.

Let us know if you want us to act on it or will you be acting your self ? to make it better ?
--
Best,
Vasundhar
--
If Physics is my God, Linux is my Girlfriend.
I go to the temple of biology to understand God with my girlfriend. ;) [Some call it Bioinformatics

Then after nearly six months, I had to book and travel with redbus, This time since I had to go straight from office which was located off Indiranagar road, pretty close to the redbus office, I asked if I can collect the ticket from their office and if they can arrange it there, They told me to com over and I what I found is a duplex house with bunch of cables lying here and there and few young chaps of my age working on the first floor, if I remember right his name was shiva, who helped out that day by calling the agents to confirm the tickets and wrote the number etc., on the paper. (I think they had some issue with the database or something to process the payment or something similar)

First things I noticed after going there were bunch of computers, with ubuntu , numbers of many travel agents marked in all the colours and few guys taking care of the backend,reservations and so on...

But they were extremely friendly and customer focused. Needless to say the travel had no hiccups this time as they seems to have workedout on the complaints me and other folks complained about on 1 March 2007. Then I wrote the following mail.

Tremendous Improvement
1 message

Vasundhar <bvasundhar@gmail.com>

Sat, Aug 18, 2007 at 16:56
Hi Team,

I am very happy with the kind of service you are providing, with commitment.

I gave a bad feed back about your service on March 1 2007, and Best Feed back now
which really is great deal of effort on your part in gaining customer satisfaction and trust,

All the best for your future,

Vasundhar.

Since then it became kind of habit for me to go there and book tickets either online or go visit those exciting guys (They were not that famous back then though they did great job)

I wanted to feel the excitement and they never turned me down to visit and share few plesantaries.

When I see the news about them knowing the startup ups and downs of redbus as a customer, I thought of sharing what I feel is a great Team Effort in building one of the most innovative and successful brands. Taking an opportunity to Thank and Congratulate the entire team and founders vision in successfully executing it.

Congratulations Redbus. and Thank You.

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