About metering and billing credibility, the TRAI report says, “The service provider (BSNL) just fails to meet TRAI specified benchmark with percentage billing complaints being equal to 0.1% of the total bills generated.” The regulatory authority has also found BSNL falling short of TRAI specified benchmark for response time to customer for assistance. The TRAI benchmark response time is 60 seconds.
The audit for cellular mobile service providers, conducted at their respective MSCs in J&K circle involved a three stage verification process which consisted of auditing the records of the service providers and verifying the data submitted to TRAI. The second step involved a three day live measurement of all the network parameters. Finally the auditors needed to find out the busy hour for the service provider and collect the hourly data for this busy hour for the month in which the audit was conducted.
BSNL was found “not to be meeting the TRAI specified benchmark with a call drop rate of more than 9.7 percent. The highest service access delay was observed for BSNL at 15 seconds.”
All the operators, except Aircel, are meeting the TRAI specified on the congestion parameters. “Dishnet (Aircel) does not meet the benchmark on SDCCH congestion with a congestion as high as 3.50 percent,” the report says.
On percentage connections with good voice quality, a drive test conducted by IMRB with the help of service providers to measure this parameter found that BSNL with 94.43 percent and Dishnet Aircel with 94.53 percent score with good voice quality did not meet the TRAI benchmark.
BSNL was also found not to be meeting the benchmark of < 0.1% complaints registered per 100 bills issued.
The survey by VOICE also hit hard on BSNL for their wireline service. “Subscribers’ perception of Basic (wireline) service was assessed for “7” defined parameters through 33 questions and Implementation and Effectiveness of Telecom Consumers Protection and Redressal of Grievances Regulations, 2007 through 22 questions. As regard to the J&K Service Area performance of operators, BSNL is the only operator which not meeting any of the prescribed parameters’ benchmark with respect to quality of service,” the VOICE report said. “The customer perception of the parameter maintainability is poor in J&K Service Area as BSNL was not able to meets the benchmark of 95%,” the report added further.
The Overall Customer Satisfaction Level has a benchmark of greater than 95 percent set out by TRAI. The VOICE report says that the customer perception of overall satisfaction level is poor in J&K Service Area as “out of 4 operators, none of them meet the benchmark.”
“In terms of customer satisfaction level, the achievement level of the operators ranged from 69.4 percent to 80.7 percent,” the voice report said. “The highest overall satisfaction level was achieved by Reliance Communication (80.7%) followed by Aircel (73.2%) and Bharti (72.2%). The lowest overall satisfaction level was achieved by BSNL at 69.4%.”
In case of billing (Benchmark >90%), the pre-paid segment showed that none of the 4 operators meet the benchmark of 90 percent. “Similar situation was found in post-paid segment where none of the 4 operators meet the benchmark of 90 percent,” says the survey report.
TRAI had carried out a customer satisfaction survey for J&K service area during the period from September’08 to November’08. The survey covered 1,202 mobile subscribers, 384 fixed line subscribers and 384 broadband subscribers across the various districts and cities of J&K service area spread across various geographies and customer strata. For the survey, TRAI engaged M/s IMRB as independent agency for conducting an objective assessment of the Quality of Service provided by basic and cellular mobile telephone service providers and broadband service providers and Voluntary Organisation in Interest of Consumer Education (VOICE) for conducting subjective customer satisfaction surveys for assessing the customers’ perception of the service and to assess the implementation and effectiveness of Telecom Consumers Protection and Redressal of Grievances Regulations, 2007.
