It has been a long long wait for the whole issue to be addressed. As mentioned in the earlier posts, it has been a long roller coaster ride and I wish to share my experiences via this blog.
Since the last email (and the last blog post),over a month has elapsed. I heard nothing from them. I had emailed to TRAI and came to know that indeed some action was taken on the complaint which addressed the issue of the violation of their own orders. I managed to get hold of a person in the network “team”- different from the usual nodal/ appellate authority crap. I pressed on the charges and suddenly some sense dawned on them.
It was a stinker of an email sent to their office which specifically mentioned the insults as well as the violation of various TRAI’s regulations. Surprise surprise. In the evening, I got a call from the network in charge as well their commercial office via a conference call. The nodal officer was a party to the same.
It was a free flow of the exchange of the ideas. I told them specifically that any of the concern needs to be given to me in writing. This in turn, would be proof of their inadequacy to service the customer. It appears that they had been well informed about the case; more so when they dropped names. It was worthwhile to name the nodal officer and their ilk about their utter incompetency and to make them work as well as see reason to ensure seamless coverage.
The big news was the mobile number portability which would kick in from this year end. In that case, we can always hold this as a bargaining chip to negotiate better contracts or better service levels.
In all this brouhaha, I learnt that the telecom operators are supposed to file in reports every quarter with TRAI regarding the status of complaints. Although TRAI doesn’t entertain the individual complaints directly, they do write in to the operators when their own regulations are flouted. Most of the operators who don’t respond or address the consumers in the given time frame, do so. Fact of the matter is that there is no point in cursing the idiots because the inherent system is not going to change overnight. The wheels of the Indian Government move slowly at a glacial pace. Hence a bit of patience is required at the same time.
I am toying with the idea of filing a RTI application regarding making those compliance reports as regards to the benchmarks public. Those compliance reports need to be put online; the same should be available on the website of each individual operator so that the status of a given complaint can be tracked. Further, the customer should be informed periodically through SMS regarding the pendency as well as the action taken through written or electronic means.
I threatened Vodafone’s bosses regarding filing of those reports through RTI as well as making these telecom operators little more answerable to their paying customers. I am sure that a strong message has gone and I waiting for the next week when something is promised to happen.
It’s high time something is done on an urgent basis to clean the augean stables.
