Mobile services labeled unsatisfactory

BANGALORE: All mobile operators in India, both GSM and CDMA are way below the TRAI benchmarks on various aspects of user satisfaction. This has been revealed in the "3rd Annual Voice&Data-IDC Mobile Users' Satisfaction Survey".

In the overall category, BPL emerged the numero uno with an overall satisfaction score of 79.8 percent. Idea Cellular came ahead of Hutch marginally by 0.2 percent to take the second position. No CDMA service provider figures in the top five, and this should be attributed to their relatively newer operations in comparison to the GSM players.

Tata Teleservices topped among the CDMA players, followed by BSNL. In the overall category, Reliance lies towards the bottom of the table with scores of 69.3 percent and 67.9 percent in CDMA and GSM respectively. Bharti is the only integrated service provider, which features in the top five. Regional players like BPL, Idea, Aircel, Hexacom, RPG and MTNL lead in terms of users' satisfaction as compared to larger players.

Overall, the survey points out that all service providers are currently lacking on all fronts, vis-à-vis the TRAI benchmarks, and that too by huge margins in many cases.

The survey also found out that for a majority of the mobile subscribers, network quality is the top criteria when it comes to choosing a service provider, with 70 percent of the respondents saying that it was important. For 29 percent of the respondents, it was the single most important criterion for choosing a mobile service provider.

In overall network availability, none of the operators have achieved the TRAI benchmark of 95 percent and even the best operator lags by a huge difference of 15.8 percentage points. BPL Cellular topped network availability with a score of 79.2 followed by Aircel with scores of 78.9 and Idea with scores of 78.1. This shows that smaller operators may not have added a lot many new subscribers, but their networks are better than those of larger operators with more subscribers.

As far as overall sales and presales satisfaction go, even the best service provider falls short of the benchmark by 8.5 percent. In this case, the top three are GSM operators-BPL Cellular, which scored 86.5 percent, Hutch (84.7 percent) and RPG (84.4 percent). Tata Teleservices, which is fourth in overall standing, tops the CDMA category.

On the billing satisfaction front, most service providers continue to languish way below the TRAI benchmark. In this category, MTNL (CDMA) is the number one with a score of 79.4 percent followed by MTNL (GSM), with 78.1 percent. BSNL (CDMA) took the third position with 77.7 percent. Contrary to popular belief, the overall billing satisfaction of the incumbent operators is higher than that of private service providers

According to TRAI, billing errors should be 0.1 percent per month. But the Voice&Data-IDC survey found out that around nine percent respondents have had billing problems with their current service provider. This figure is on the higher side. In billing disputes and complaints, Reliance had the highest number of complaints, an average of 24 complaints for every 100 subscribers, which is quite alarming.

Subscribers do have a high awareness about services like SMS, roaming, voicemail, call waiting, and call forwarding with awareness falling in the 56-90 percent bracket for these. Usage, however, is almost half of the level of awareness in a majority of cases. On the data front, awareness is very low, at about 7 percent.

Interestingly, the 'subscriber-service provider relationship' in India shows that almost 2/3rd of the subscribers are satisfied, loyal, and likely to recommend their current service providers. But, about 20 percent users are likely to opt for a new service provider according to the survey findings.

The nationwide survey was based on a sample of 2,217 GSM and CDMA mobile users spread across 14 cities including all the four metros. About 82 percent of the respondents were GSM subscribers and 18 percent were CDMA subscribers, selected on the basis of subscriber figures in September 2003. The prepaid vs postpaid ratio was maintained in the sample according to the subscriber ratio.

The objective of the survey was to analyze the overall satisfaction of the subscribers with their current service provider in five areas-presales/sales, network availability, performance, and reliability, customer care, value-added services and billing integrity. Individual scores on each of these parameters were compared with the long-term benchmarks set by TRAI on the quality of services in basic and cellular mobile telephone services, in 2000. These benchmarks are above 95 percent for presales/sales; above 90 percent for billing and above 90 percent for customer care; above 95 percent for network performance, reliability and availability; above 95 percent for value-added services; above 95 percent for overall customer satisfaction. The TRAI directives however lack in specifying any methodology or scale with respect to the benchmarks. Therefore, ITU (International Telecommunication Union) suggestions on scale and methodology were adopted for this study.

(CyberMedia News Service)