How would you react when one of the largest cellular operator’s
customer care cell cannot be reached for three consecutive days, at different
times? And worst, it has a customer care e-mail ID on its website, which is
actually wrong!
Welcome to the world of customer care, Indian style. Most of
the private telecom service providers, who have always derived pleasure out of
taking a dig at the incumbent operators’ poor customer care services, are
actually following the same path. Visit their websites, most of them make
customer the king–literally. AirTel says, "We will always put our
customers first, while Essar claims that they are "always ready to take
care of any problem you (read customer) may face." Similar is the case with
other fixed as well as Internet service providers. Most of the companies, except
for a few, are reluctant to find out what they claim and what they actually
deliver in terms of customer care. Most of the customer care heads who were
contacted by Voice & Data repeatedly, expressed their extreme disinterest or
showed their preoccupation with other work.
Cellular
Essar Cellphone
Getting through their number in Delhi is a real pain. Their number was reached
after three long days of constant trying at different points in time. After
getting through the number, the response was good and the person handling the
call was able to provide the required information. Siddharth Chatterjee, head of
customer care at Essar admits this and says, "The average response time is
less than 3 rings. However, as the call centre is under a process of upgradation,
current response times are longer. Currently a major overhauling is being done
We expect to get over with the upgradation soon. We currently have 3 E1 cards
for customer care that are being upgraded. We have stipulated time frames for
the resolution of complaints and execution of requests. The resolution time
frames are different for different complaints or requests–a majority of them
are however resolved or executed during the call itself."
Essar has an online help, which asks you to send e-mail to
their customer care. If you are trying to reach them through this, you are in
for a shock of your life. The e-mail id mentioned is care@essarcellphone.com.
Send in the e-mail and you’ll get it back in few minutes. Not with the answer
to the queries you had asked for, but with a message that the e-mail id is
incorrect. One of the heavy users of their service was shocked to discover that
his service was disconnected, without any information, after he returned from a
vacation. When quizzed, the customer care personnel had no clue and was trying
to put the blame for disconnection on the user instead of offering apologies. In
another specific case, a corporate customer who was badly in need of a
customised service from Essar, is yet to get back to them with the package till
now. Now that Essar is gearing up for the launch of the much-talked about brand
"Orange" in Delhi shortly, it should pay extra attention towards a
qualitative improvement in the customer care.
AirTel in Delhi is somewhat better, but it also has a long
way to go. Call completion rate to their call center was satisfactory. In
Bangalore, though it has a good customer care solutions, their attitude is not
that friendly. AirTel, despite repeated calls and e-mails did not respond to the
questionnaire.
In Mumbai, cellular subcribers get the best customer care as
both the operators are fighting to win the customers on that front. Both Orange
and BPL have captive call centres to deal with customers. BPL has galleries
across the city, more like service centres to deal with complaints. BPL Mobile
has, what they call "MobileAssist Online", which is 24-hour web access
to your bplmobile account information. With MobileAssist Online a customer can
check-billing details, previous bills, outstanding amounts charged for services,
detailed billing check. RPG Cellular, which has Vodafone Airtouch Plc as its
partner and operates cellular services in Chennai, has customer care centers and
customer query centres. The customer care center is a 24-hour service. It has a
segmented call center, where agents have specialisation in the type of query
they handle. Amitabh Ghosh, head of customer care at RPG Cellular, when asked
about their strategy, said " We would like to keep our customer care
strategy close to our chest." SkyCell's, another operator in Chennai has
something called "tele-shop" which invites walk-ins between 09:00 hrs
and 20:00 hrs, six days a week, for any type of query. They also have a round
the clock subscriber-care, where trained executives provide multi-lingual
service. Spice, which operates services in Punjab and Karnataka, has 24 hour
toll free service. It is a multilingual call center with agents versed in local
languages. In Calcutta, Usha Communication, which operates mobile services under
the brand Command, has about 20 support customers, which is likely to increase
to 30 around the coming year. They conduct a survey on customer care service
every quarter. The quality of service is satisfactory.
Among all cellular operators, Escotel Cellular emerged as the
cut above the rest, in terms of customer care. The calls got through most of the
time and the agent at the other end was competent and answered all the questions
satisfactorily, with a high quality of professionalism. One distinguishing
feature of Escotel is its "Service Guarantee" which is signed by its
CEO Manoj Kohli. It contains a personal signature that extends a unique 'Service
Guarantee'–a performance assurance to compensate the customer in case it falls
to deliver against stringent service delivery standards. It actually had to
shell out a huge sum of money to subscribers recently when it failed to provide
service, due to a technical snag in its network. It has hired a US-based market
research agency, AC Nielsen, to give a feedback on customer care on a monthly
basis. Says Alok Kumar, chief general manager customer care at Escotel " We
have empowered the front desk and have identified the key processes to serve the
customer in an efficient way and we are moving towards a zero defect
situation." In terms of calls, it receives 2.8 lakh calls per month from
post paid subscribers, while 40 lakh subscribers call from the pre-paid
category, mainly asking about the balance amount, etc. Live agents handle about
2.5 lakh calls on a monthly basis. The infrastructure is such that for every
3000 subscribers there is a separate workstation. There are currently 48 such
workstations.
Basic
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, the new face of DoT, is
chalking out its customer care strategy. As of now they are carrying on with the
customer care centers which operate only on weekdays from 10 am to 3 p.m. Beyond
that time, there is nothing BSNL has to offer except for the automated answering
machines that are there. Now, with corporatization, one only hopes that things
will improve. At least, there are signs of it in terms of what ministers and the
top officials of the new body say. Ram Vilas Paswan recently said in Jaipur,
that the government was working on a massive project to make customer care
available for 24 hours. According to DPS Seth, first CMD of newly formed BSNL
and former head of customer care, says "I agree that the level of customer
care is far from satisfactory but we are working towards it". He also
informed Voice & Data that Indore will have a 24 customer care center very
soon. This obviously follows the strong presence of Bharti who are emerging as a
big competitor to them there. The Ministry of communication had tied up with www.webdunia.com
for redressal of grievances. A customer is supposed to log on to the site and
post their grievances to the minister. The response has been very poor as the
service has not been advertised properly and is not been handled professionally
by the webdunia.com people. They had removed the link for months together for
unconvincing reasons given to Voice & Data.
At a time when everybody is talking about 7/24/365 meaning
seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year customer care, MTNL’s
customer care still remains limited to only during office hours. The customer
care center opens at 10, with much difficulty, and closes at 3 p.m. without
fail. Any customer who has any grievance has no option but to wait for the next
working day and the scheduled office hours. MTNL has an area, sub-area and
division customer service centers which take care of specific queries. The IVR
is somewhat a good service that MTNL has, as it does not require human
intervention. Most of the people are not very happy with MTNL as their service
leaves a lot to be desired
Hughes Tele.com, which is the second basic operator in Mumbai,
has an obvious advantage over its competitor MTNL but is yet to make its mark,
although they have a call centre which functions on a 24-hour basis. At the core
of their customer care is Virtuoso-II System that encompasses within its folds
Order Processing, Billing and Work-Order Systems which are integrated with each
other. Shyam Telecom, which recently started its operation in Jaipur has set up
a state-of-the-art call center catering to their broadband customers. They are
in the process of starting the web initiative wherein customers can actually log
in and chat online to resolve their grievances. Cincom and Lucent are the
partners for this.
Internet Services
Customer care in Internet services is still a far cry. Due to
bandwidth related hitches, customers have a lot of difficulty, which is
sometimes beyond the ISP to solve. As the last mile service providers also have
an important role in the quality of services that are offered, customer care
becomes still more important. But most often the refrain of ISP is that it is
last mile and bandwidth related problems on which they have no role to play. A
category ISPs has an edge over the other
two categories in terms of customer care.
Web Initiative
Though a very powerful interface that companies can have with
their customers, it is yet to emerge as a potent tool in India. Language is a
major barrier as subscribers are from varies language segment. Low level of
Internet penetration is another big hurdle. It is not surprising, though, that
most of the companies have chosen to shy away from utilising their website as a
platform for customer care. Chennai Telephones have a very exhaustive section
about customer care. The MTNL site does not have an e-mail inquiry link where a
customer can post his queries. This is a very convenient way of handling
inquires and it is surprising why MTNL has chosen not to do anything in this
regard. Escotel is planning a major web initiative, which will be all
encompassing and those customers who have access to Internet will be a major
beneficiary of this exercise. Real time chat between the subscribers and the
customer care agents is still a far cry in India, as very few are interested in
this web interface as of now.
Ground Reality
Why is the situation so bad on the customer care front,
especially in relation to telecom services in India? Reasons are not far to
seek. Initially, when private players were getting into business and there was a
stiff competition, the quality of services and customer care was excellent.
Stabilising of competition has spelt disaster for customers. In most cases, the
customers have now no option but to choose from the best among the worst.
Customer relationship management is something that the operators have to
integrate with their business instead of keeping it a separate entity. Companies
will have to see customer relationship vis-Ã -vis saving in terms of cost or
revenue actually earned.