I was first introduced to this service from the folks over at Mobikwik when they sent me a email about their service. I actually used this when I needed to do a quick recharge of my BSNL and Tata Docomo connections while I was travelling.

The service is pretty easy to use. All you need to do is to sign up for an account. You’ll need to fund your account in-order to recharge your phone. You can fund the account using your credit/debit card or netbanking. I was able to recharge both my phone in under 5 minutes.  I am also very impressed with their support. I got an answer to a query I posted on their site within a few minutes.

Another interesting service prepaid users should find interesting is the ability to schedule a recharge, so you can set a future recharge date, and your prepaid balance recharged on the date you set. Useful to schedule the next month’s charge in advance.

When you’re on the move and you’re almost out of balance, you can also send the service a quick SMS and get your account recharged in a jiffy. All you need to do is to register your mobile number and send a message with the amount you want to recharge to their service : RC 50 9810125432 where 50 is the amount to recharge on your number.

I had asked Mr. Bipin Preet Singh the CEO of Mobikwik a few questions about their service:

Q: What happens when a recharge doesn’t go though properly? how long does it take to locate the problem/refund the charge?
A: Mobikwik realizes that operator server’s are not 100% efficient and recharge can sometimes fail due to operator server being down, or invalid amount being entered etc. Therefore, mobikwik has concept of mobikwik balance. So, if you pay Rs 100 to recharge, but recharge did not happen, your balance does not get deducted. So you can try again later. Else, you can send a customer support email which is there on our home page. We respond in 24 hours.

Q: Recurring Recharge – I see you have a scheduled recharge which allows a user to plan one charge in advance. Are you planning something where the user can set a recurring recharge, let’s say once a week/month/…
A: Actually, with current schedule recharge, you can set it up as many times as you want, once a week, once a month, once a year. There is no restriction.

Q: Do you support data plan recharges? If yes, which operators do you support currently and which ones are planned in the future?
A: Yes, we do support data plan recharges for all leading operators.

I did find the data recharge option missing for my operators unfortunately, Tata Docomo and BSNL didn’t have the 3G data recharge options on Mobikwik yet. Hope that too comes up in the near future. I hate having to run to the nearest dealer to get that done.

Check out their service at: www.mobikwik.com and follow them on twitter @mobikwik . If you’ve tried out Mobikwik let us know your experiences by commenting on this post.