The freeze in the recruitment process will help in saving a lot of revenue for the company as it is estimated that the operating expenditure takes away 30 percent of the turnover of the company. The increase in salary with the induction of employees in BSNL will also increase the operating expenditure. It is estimated that there would be a minimum rise of 50 percent in the salary of BSNL employees. Though it is said that the new services will help in compensating this increase, BSNL will have to initiate cost cutting exercise.

Increased Focus on Customer Care

For improving its branding in the market and to face competition aggressively, BSNL is improving its customer care by initiating a number of steps on the macro front. This, however, would not be enough, as the company has to look into more micro steps. Customer care should start right from the linesman to the top management of the company and should not be driven only from the top management. It will take a long time for BSNL to provide excellent service to the customers, as their employees have been working in a monopoly regime for quite a long period of time—where customer care hardly existed.

To start with a number of steps have been taken to improve customer service. The fault analysis of BSNL says that around 20 percent of faults are due to telephone instruments. A decision has been taken by BSNL that they would like to encourage people to have their own telephone instruments and their own wiring (from the interface unit to the home) says Dr DPS Seth. This will provide the customer the flexibility to choose their own instruments thereby giving them a rebate of Rs 500 in installation charges. The other method for reducing fault rate is to minimise the cable segment and use of drop wires.

It has been decided that there will be increased use of optical fibre or radio connectivity to the remote subscriber unit that is located near the subscriber and beyond that copper will be used. The net result is reduction in copper cable and thus reduction in the fault creating area. The drop wire is also a major cause of fault & will be replaced by more five pair cables that will be used right into the premises of the subscribers and will be terminated on a five pair distribution point.

It is very difficult to lodge a complaint or to get any query answered. So, for responding to customer queries there would be a single telephone number for all the complaints rather than having separate numbers by providing customer service centres or call centres. These centres will have a number of operators having the database of customers on their computers, thereby helping the agents to answer the queries of the customer. The agents will then make sure that the information flows to the concerned person and a response is obtained within the timeframe.

"We are hoping that the first call centre would be ready in Indore by December", says Dr DPS Seth. "Once the software for the Indore centre is finalised we will make it available to other places, as all SSAs are planned to have a call centre. The number of seats in each city will depend upon the size of the exchange and type of the network.

Strengthening Existing Services:

A lot has to be done to make the existing services commercially viable, be it basic services or the ISP service keeping in view the market dynamics that are fast changing. The company has to be more agile to the pricing as it is operating in a competitive environment and not in a monopolistic environment. There was no focus on marketing of services as the demand far outstripped the supply. The company now has to pay more attention on marketing their services.

The company plans to strengthen existing services says BR Khurana, director (Commercial & New Services), BSNL, by focussing more on the Internet and value added services on the IP and IN (intelligent) platforms. "Focus should also be on marketing of existing services thereby informing the customers about the host of services offered by BSNL," says Khurana.

In the ISP segment, BSNL is present in 65 cities but has a nominal base of 75,000 subscribers. The company is planning to increase its marketing presence in these cities and also increase their presence in most of the cities in India. According to Dr DPS Seth, "In the ISP market, as far as our strength is concerned, nobody else matches us on that but when it comes to reliability and bandwidth there is a lot to be achieved. We have worked out a certain set of decisions. First, is the NIB (National Internet Backbone) which would be commissioned any day now as various tests are getting completed. This will help in providing higher bandwidth inside the country. This will be accompanied by an aggressive marketing campaign which has started with the coming out of an aggressive Internet tariff structure recently."

Jumping into New Services:

In order to pay its huge workforce, the company is planning to jump into new services where investment is much less a witched networks. BSNL should have a futuristic outlook and keep on updating its network, if required, to be competitive. In the long run, a part of the equity should be divested in favour of a strategic partner so that it becomes a customer-focused company.