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.
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.