When we opened the first of the filled questionnaires that we got from corporate users of mobile phones, one of the unsatisfied customers stated, “My service provider is one of the worst and I strongly feel that there should be more competition for these types of service providers. Though I am one of the priority customers (according to the bill amount), I get very poor response from them. Incidentally, almost all my friends in the industry who have this service provider, complain about their services...”. This was a user from Chennai, whose average monthly bill went up to Rs 15,000. As we went along, it became apparent that he was not alone. If the operators scored in some areas, there were a number of gray areas too. Most users covered in the seven cities – Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune – had a mixed opinion of the services that they got.

An interesting revelation from the data that we got was that many users (fifty six percent) blamed the absence of competition for less than the expected level of service. No doubt, a whopping eighty nine percent of them wanted more operators in their circles. 

Another interesting result that the survey brought out was that the state monoliths, MTNL, and the newly formed BSNL are not considered as bad as they are made out to be. A good twenty percent of users rated them as equal to the cellular service providers in terms of services (connectivity, drop rates, network infrastructure, etc). On the customer care front too, thirty percent of users found no difference between the cellular service providers and MTNL or BSNL.

Ravi Shekhar Pandey