That's What The Telcos Deliver To You

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http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/860320.cms

RAJESHWARI ADAPPA THAKUR

MUMBAI: You’d have thought that competition would have made the difference. But ask any Indian consumer, private operators or public sector, and the uniform crib is — phone bills are confusing, nightmarish, complicated and frustrating. We talked to a number of users and telecom operators, the Great Divide, if you can call it, is still as vast as it ever was during the days of the MTNL monopoly.

Here are some snap cases that are, peculiar to say the least.

A consumer who’s not signed up with a particular operator get a bill, whereas another who actually has the phone line, doesn’t get one. Despite the marketing hype, all telcos seem to disconnect unpaid phones at the drop of a bill, but a reconnection is possible only after endless calls or a visit to the company’s showroom.

Take two: Despite the competition, there is not one operator who satisfies customers, although all operators say their bills are designed only after market surveys or by experts.

So is the Indian consumer generally difficult to please? Take the case of bill formats.

“Can’t make sense of the bill” is a standard complaint.

Telcos say they give all details. But as in the case of Niranjan Mohnot, a Mumbai-based chartered accountant, it takes a specialist to sort it out, at times. He was surprised to see the difference in the manner of calculation of service tax in his mobile bills from MTNL and Orange. While the MTNL bill does not take discounts into consideration when charging service tax, the Orange bill does. Thus, MTNL consumers are paying service tax even on services they do not avail of. Mr Mohnot has written to MTNL, but is yet to get a reply. One major point leading to confusion: there is also no fixed format for bills from different companies.

For instance, do you know your minutes of usage (MoU) the minute you see the bill, or how many calls you have made? Some companies give details of the pulses. But they do not explain to the consumer what a pulse means and what impact it has on one’s billing.

The biggest consumer complaint is that, despite the frequent and major tariff drops, the bill still stays the same. “I was paying about Rs 1,000 a year ago; I still pay the same amount, possibly more, not less,” said an irate customer.

u Related report on P 6

Operators argue that this is because the talktime or the MoUs have risen. While talktime may have gone up marginally, the operators tout the rate drops as more than 50% each time they cut tariffs. If so, how come the bill does not show even a 20% decline?

Billing

Rajeshwari Adappa Thakur

MUMBAI 22 SEPTEMBER

A significant section of consumers feel that companies charge for calls that they have never made. In other words, many believe that telecom operators deliberately commit fraud. It is common, for instance, for prepaid users to complainthat an extra rupee or two is often deducted after a call or a text message.

Prepaid users have the advantage of being able to check their balances immediately. Post-paid users can also keep tabs on their usage by calling up the hotline numbers for billing enquiries. Recently, a consumer was shocked to see that after just four or five calls, he was charged an amount of Rs 25-30. He has since changed the operator.

Operators, however, argue that overcharging is just not possible. “The switch generates the call, which is recorded by the Call Data Register (CDR) and the billing engine then decides the rate that should be charged for each of these calls. The entire operation is automated. We do not have the ability to play with the switch,” said an official with a mobile operator.

Industry sources pooh-pooh the entire myth that operators indulge in fraud , not just because they can’t do it, but because there’s no pay-off. “In the case of a prepaid voucher, even if we overcharge, the consumer is unlikely to go in for purchase of a recharge voucher before the expiry of the first voucher. Airtime is a perishable commodity. I do not care how much the consumer talks, once I get the Rs 300 rental. I do not make anything out of overcharging the consumer,” says an official.