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Pay MTNL bills at petrol pumps

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

NEW DELHI: Even before TRAI had released the quality of service (QoS)

guidelines for telecom operators, the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL) had

already begun working on making life easy for customers. During the last two

months, the company has initiated several measures to address the vexing problem

of billing and collection. A significant move in this direction is its tie-up

with Indian Oil Corp. to enable customers pay their telephone bills through

Master Card at petrol pumps. In a pilot project, the last one month has seen the

setting up of this facility in 13 petrol pumps across the city. This facility

will be available in 30 petrol pumps in the next phase, scheduled to commence

from August. MTNL is working on tying up with Bharat Petroleum, Hindustan

Petroleum and even some popular shopping malls, says a senior official of the

company.

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Being a virtual monopoly and having a large customer base, MTNL faces a

unique set of problems that it has been trying to address. Says the official,

"Our customer base in Delhi alone is 1.8 lakh." Although it may be

rather late in the day to spruce up its customer orientation, it is better late

than never. Since last year, MTNL has been investing heavily in front-office

applications. During fiscal 1999-2000, MTNL had invested around Rs 50 crore for

offering value-added services to its customers. Its major initiative was the

setting up of an intelligent network that helped in providing services like

virtual calling card, calling line identification and automatic fault complaint

services. Linesmen were provided with pagers and after an automatic scanning by

the system, if the complaint had to be handled at the field level, the concerned

linesmen was automatically paged.

MTNL has initiated several measures for easy billing and payment. For

instance, you can log in to the company's site to check up your telephone bills

and pay them online. MTNL has tied up with Master Card, Indian Overseas Bank,

Standard Chartered, and Vijaya Bank to facilitate easy payments. The company

uses SWIFTBILL, billing solution from Hughes Software System. However, no formal

survey has yet been done on the level of customer satisfaction as the services

have been initiated by the different divisions of MTNL. As a result, it has not

been able to capitalize on the results of its initiatives.

Currently, MTNL has about 100 collection centers which also double up as

billing complaint centers. The number of bill collection centers is expected to

increase to around 200 by the end of this year and to 300 eventually. According

to the official, MTNL has been aware of the long queues at its payment counters

and has been working out ways to serve the customer. The tie-up with petrol

pumps was just one such initiative. "Indian Oil and CitiBank had recently

launched a petrol card and this has now been extended to MTNL," says the

official. But here again MTNL has left the marketing to MasterCard and Indian

Oil. As a result, awareness about this initiative among customers is low. The

collections at the petrol pumps too have been low, at just Rs 7,13,000 in the

one-and-a-half month of their launch. Recently, MTNL had tied up with American

Express to launch a co-branded card.

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