When will telcos move beyond price, offers and land grab
Over the last 48 hours, I've had the opportunity to experience 2 vastly different businesses as a customer. First, I needed a prepaid SIM for my son so headed over to my telecom provider - given that I've been a customer (I also have one of those fancy, precious metal categories that I fall into) for over a decade. Boggles the mind that the process of getting a 2nd SIM is the same (I'm told it's a TRAI regulation) as that for a new customer - that you have to authenticate yourself again using Aadhar, answer a bunch of questions and it will then take 24 hours to activate. I don’t even want to elaborate on the point of poor network connectivity in the showroom/shop! What's more, if I call the service center I normally call, I'm told they can't help because prepaid customers have a different number and they don't really have a relationship view/pricing for anything.
Some years ago I was amazed at another telco's inability to do away with processes and extend the same benefits to me when I moved from Delhi to Mumbai and wanted a new number. I believe it's a telecom industry thing and not specific to one company. If they can't deepen share of wallet within their own industry I wonder what they're smoking thinking of getting into banking. Given one customer more of your product versus finding more customers to try you is a vastly better bet, surely.
Second, I needed payments reversed on my American Express Card and whilst, a fairly messed up NEFT problem, it was taken care of in a 10-minute call, extremely professionally handled. There's such an amazing relationship view they have, that you can't but be amazed. Each time I have a problem, they take a view of the overall relationship and the person on the phone is (or at least seems like) empowered to do what they think is the right thing for the customer.
I wonder if it is because one industry is just gotten so used to competing on price, offers and general land grab, while a player like Amex in another commoditized business is fine without winning the vanity metrics game but delivering where it matters.
Engagement Manager at Tata Consultancy Services
7yI am assuming you are using Vodafone or Airtel. While TRAI might have regulations, JIO has completely on boarded the new SIM process on a app which the authorised agent or express centre can help with. The whole process was based on Aadhar authentication real time using on finger print and autopopulation of most of the paper work. It didn't take more than 10 mins to get the SIM activate it and make the 1st call. The same thing when I had tried on Vodafone 6 months back was painful long process involving manual paper work and delay of a day before the SIM can be activated. What was even more irritating was to deactivate / convert a post paid no I had to mandatorily visit service centre and cannot be done online or customer care. I am not sure whether this deliberate strategy to make it a offline and elongated process by Telcos or just lack of adoption of digization in some process. Now how can two Telcos under the same TRAI umbrella have such a different CX onboarding / exit process? I have a strong feeling this is not on account of regulatory restrictions.
Educator and Trainer | Learning and Development | Entrepreneurship I Consulting
7y"I believe it's a telecom industry thing and not specific to one company. If they can't deepen share of wallet within their own industry I wonder what they're smoking thinking of getting into banking."...This I believe has been the perennial problem of the telecom industry, instead of focusing on improving service quality and network strength, all they do is keep crying about regulations, competition and how over the top players are leveraging their infrastructure. Just a simple question then - why aren't you leveraging it yourself??
Financial Analyst at Hewlett Packard
7yinterested in senior accountant and General Ledger accountant
Head of Finance - Wireless Group at News UK
7yEvery time I visit India it takes me 2 days to get a prepaid sim. Coming from a telecom background I can tell that a lot of this delay is due to TRAI regulations but agree with you that quality of customer service has gone down the drain.