Top of the Mind
Bharti Airtel and Nokia are the top of the mind brands for subscribers in
operators and handset category. Both brands are way ahead of their competitors
and other brands have to do a lot of innovation to catch up with the winners. In
the operator side, Bharti does a clean sweep in cost effective tariff plans,
widest choice of basic mobile services, best connectivity and coverage, most
relevant and friendly value added features, and most future ready technology and
infrastructure.
On the other hand, Nokia is the clear leader in all categories
like most feature leaded handsets, most well designed and appealing handsets,
most easy to use keys and menus, and most relevant and user friendly value added
features.
Customer Care
Operators needs to pull up their socks on the customer care front. There
have been some initiatives but those are not reflected in the data. The average
waiting time to speak to a customer care representative varies from 4.31 to 9.25
minutes. This shows that people have to endlessly wait to get connected. It
seems, the call centers are overburdened and one needs urgent attention to
increase its capacity so that the duration can be shortened.
Billing
With mobile bills increasing, subscribers have become cost conscious and are
giving more importance to billing. Billing weightages have increased over the
years as it is around 38 percent in the overall category, which is high despite
11 years of mobile launch in the country. Mobile operators should focus on
resolving billing complaints so that everybody benefits in the long run. The
weightage in metro is 29 percent while in A circle it is 32 percent and in
B&C circle it is 29 percent.
3G
It is heartening to know that around 61 percent of subscribers are aware of
3G services and this is a good starting point of operators if they plan to
launch the service in 2007. Regarding perception, 3G is viewed as mobile
Internet access device, personal organizer, and mobile music system/camera/video
player. One needs to do a lot of innovation and it has to start with VAS
services presently being announced by operators.
There is a problem on the retention front. Additions are fine
but operators have not been able to retain subscribers. The next phase of
consolidation will be on retention as future services would be costlier to
rollout and so retention will be the key. Both operators as well as regulator
need to educate the customers and see to it that satisfaction level increases.
An interesting data that came out from the survey was that 19 percent of mobile
subscribers did not own even own a bicycle. And this is good for operator.
Pravin Prashant
pravinp@cybermedia.co.in
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