Advertisment

Customer Care Miles to Go!!

author-image
VoicenData Bureau
New Update

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!

Advertisment

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."

Advertisment

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.

Advertisment

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.

Advertisment

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

Advertisment

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.

Advertisment

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-à-vis saving in terms of cost or

revenue actually earned.

Sudesh Prasad

Advertisment