Mobile operators'' services way below TRAI benchmarks
Our
Economy Bureau
10 January 2004
The 3rd National Mobile Users' Satisfaction Survey 2003 says that service providers have a long way to go to meet TRAI's benchmarks on subscribers' satisfaction
Hyderabad:
All mobile operators in India, both GSM and CDMA, are
way below the TRAI benchmarks on various aspects of user
satisfaction. This was revealed in the just released "3rd
Annual Voice&Data-IDC Mobile Users' Satisfaction Survey."
The nationwide survey was based on a sample of 2,217 GSM
and CDMA mobile users spread across 14 cities including
the four metros. About 82 percent of the respondents were
GSM subscribers and 18 percent were CDMA subscribers,
selected on the basis of subscriber figures in September
2003. The prepaid versus postpaid ratio was maintained
in the sample according to the subscriber ratio.
The objective of the survey was to analyze the overall
satisfaction of the subscribers with their current service
provider in five areas presales/sales; network
availability, performance and reliability; customer care;
value-added services; and billing integrity. Individual
scores on each of these parameters were compared with
the long-term benchmarks set by TRAI on the quality of
services in basic and cellular mobile telephone services,
in 2000. These benchmarks are above 95 percent for presales/sales;
above 90 percent for billing and above 90 percent for
customer care; above 95 percent for network performance,
reliability and availability; above 95 percent for value-added
services; above 95 percent for overall customer satisfaction.
The TRAI directives however lack in specifying any methodology
or scale with respect to the benchmarks. Therefore, ITU
(International Telecommunication Union) suggestions on
scale and methodology were adopted for this study.
BPL
tops survey
In the overall category, BPL emerged the numero uno
with an overall satisfaction score of 79.8 percent. Idea
Cellular was marginally ahead of Hutch by 0.2 percent
to take the second position. No CDMA service provider
figures in the top five, and this should be attributed
to their relatively newer operations in comparison to
the GSM players. Tata Teleservices topped among the CDMA
players and is followed by BSNL. In the overall category,
Reliance is at the bottom of the table with scores of
69.3 percent and 67.9 percent in CDMA and GSM respectively.
Bharti is the only integrated service provider which features
in the top five. Regional players like BPL, Idea, Aircel,
Hexacom, RPG and MTNL lead in terms of users' satisfaction
as compared to larger players.
Overall, the survey points out that all service providers
are currently lacking on all the fronts, vis-à-vis
the TRAI benchmarks, and that too by huge margins in many
cases.
Network
Quality
The survey also found that for a majority of the mobile
subscribers, network quality is the top criteria when
it comes to choosing a service provider, with 70 percent
of respondents saying that it was important. For 29 percent
of the respondents, it was the single most important criterion
for choosing a mobile service provider.
Almost 55 percent of respondents said that they had problems
while making or receiving calls or were not getting adequate
signal strength in their areas/cities/circles. Another
eight percent complained of problems with the voice quality
echoing, interference, and cross connection.
Regarding overall network availability, none of the operators
have achieved the TRAI benchmark of 95 percent and even
the best operator lags by a huge difference of 15.8 percentage
points. BPL Cellular topped network availability with
a score of 79.2 followed by Aircel with scores of 78.9
and Idea with scores of 78.1. This shows that smaller
operators may not have added a lot many new subscribers,
but their networks are better than those of larger operators
with more subscribers.
Overall
Sales/Pre-sales Satisfaction
As far as overall sales and presales satisfaction go,
even the best service provider falls short of the benchmark
by 8.5 percent. In this case, the top three are GSM operators-BPL
Cellular, which scored 86.5 percent, Hutch (84.7 percent)
and RPG (84.4 percent). Tata Teleservices, which is fourth
in overall standing, tops the CDMA category.
Billing
Problems
On the billing satisfaction front, most service providers
continue to languish way below the TRAI benchmark. In
this category, MTNL (CDMA) is the number one with a score
of 79.4 percent followed by MTNL (GSM), with 78.1 percent.
BSNL (CDMA) took the third position with 77.7 percent.
Contrary to popular belief, the overall billing satisfaction
of the incumbent operators is higher than that of private
service providers
According to TRAI, billing errors should be 0.1 percent
per month. But the Voice&Data-IDC survey found out
that around 9 percent respondents have had billing problems
with their current service provider. This figure is on
the higher side. In billing disputes and complaints, Reliance
had the highest number of complaints, an average of 24
complaints for every 100 subscribers, which is alarming
to say the least.
Value-added Services
Subscribers do have a high awareness about services like
SMS, roaming, voicemail, call waiting, and call forwarding
with awareness falling in the 56-90 percent bracket for
these. Usage, however, is almost half of the level of
awareness in a majority of cases. On the data front, awareness
is very low, at about 7 percent.