Over the past weekend, Indane’s consumers had had many anxious moments trying to book their liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder refills. “The booking and delivery system just crashed and people were unable to make bookings over the IVRS. We kept answering calls and had to deal with crowds at the agency,” said a distributor in the city.
Indian Oil on Tuesday said that Indane’s LPG booking and delivery system that was managed by IBM India had experienced an outage for two days and was currently under recovery. “Indian Oil along with IBM and Oracle are working to restore the system at the earliest.” said a release here.
Consumer activist T. Sadagopan said that with Onam around the corner, consumers, especially senior citizens, were unable to confirm bookings. “Cooking gas is an essential commodity and when the system does not work, it causes huge problems. Residents in our area kept calling me and their respective agencies to find out what had happened. Indian Oil could have informed us much earlier about the outage,” he said.
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Chandra Prakash, president, All India LPG distributors’ Federation, said that since a majority of consumers had two cylinders, distributors were able to manage. “If consumers have a problem, they can call their gas delivery man or the showroom to make a booking. The only problem we faced was in issuing invoices,” he said.
Another distributor said that they were getting bookings via Whatsapp and also from the company. “We have been calling our consumers and asking them if they had made the booking and then delivering the cylinder. No doubt it involves additional work, but our ultimate goal is to keep our consumers happy,” he said.
Indane customers can continue to make booking through: text messages or IVRS over 77189 55555 or send missed call on 84549 55555 or WhatsApp on 75888 88824.
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