Customer service seems farthest from the minds of the bigwigs at Kodak India. My experience with it over the last two days has convinced me never to go near a Kodak camera product in any hurry.

It started with a request from my relative in Mangalore who had purchased a Kodak LS743 in Dubai last year and wanted help in locating a service centre to troubleshoot a serious problem- the lens woudln't retract.

He gave me the contact numbers of Kodak's Southern regional office in Chennai, India and asked to me to find out if he could courier them the camera to set it right. What follows is a step by step account of my attempts to reach Kodak Customer Service:

1. I call 23621490 and 23621838, the two local numbers in Chennai given to my relative by a kindly soul trying to help him. Result: "This number does not exist".
2. I do a google search on "Kodak South Regional Office" and reach kodak.com
3. I try out one after another, the Consumer Photography, Digital Camera and related sections, looking in vain for a link to their service centres.
4. I try their India web site and go through the same process again and after clicking through many pages, arrive at an online form for submitting a request for repair
5. I enter the camera model number, serial number, date of purchase and so on, only to find that the form which is supposedly on the India site, is asking me to choose a two-digit U.S state
6. After abandoning that form, I do a search on the Kodak India site for their list of offices, get to a page listing their country wide offices. And, I see the same phone numbers listed that I first tried and which were reported as 'does not exist'
8. I finally call their Bombay Corporate Headquarters, introduce myself and request for the phone number of their Southern Regional Office in Chennai, the city where I live
9. I am then put on hold and transferred to 1, 2, 3 persons, to each of whom I repeat the same request. The procession ended with the 4th person to whom my call was transferred. I repeated the same request and the lady who answered obliged with a new phone number. On asking if there was just one number, she responded with "What do you want" (reasonably politely, I must add) and I then explained I was a customer with a digital camera desperately trying to locate a service centre. She then obliged me with three more phone numbers
10. I call one of these three new phone numbers and explain my problem and its background and request for a service centre number. I am put on hold while the attendant speaks to someone and comes back with another phone number, that of their distributor, Neoteric Infomatique, that I would have to contact- they didn't do servicing at *this* place. I was insistent and asked why I couldn't bring my camera to the Kodak company instead of taking it to a distributor.

    The attendant couldn't answer and connected me to her supervisor to whom I put the same question. He repeated that the phone number his attendant had given was that of a company authorised service centre and they were responsible for servicing digital cameras. We had a discussion about honoring warranties (he said I needed to show a warranty card and I said it was purchased in Dubai, I didn't have one, but couldn't they type in the serial number into their system and verify it was within warranty?) and I didn't let him go until he recited the full postal address of this distributor to whom he was passing me on.

11. I call Neoteric Infomatique and am politely told that the *actual* service centre is run by M/s. Rashi Peripherals and they are just the distributors. So, I am given another phone number and asked to contact a couple of people there
12. I call the Rashi Peripherals number and good old blessed voicemail comes online, cheerfully asking me to record a voice message. I dutifully leave a message with a call back number, taking the opportunity to inform the Rashi guys that I had, by the time I left the voice mail, made nearly 10 calls to reach them and wouldn't I appreciate if they called me back?

As of this moment, it is nearly 30 minutes and I haven't received a call yet.

I can now sympathise with every owner of a Kodak digital camera in India. Not that other companies would have drastically different stories to recount...