Commentators have argued that the new lot of mobile phone service providers got their licences for a song and that the government lost several tens of thousand crores of rupees due to this. This may or may not be true, but there can be no denying that the customer is finally getting his due. It was the new mobile phone providers who launched services like pay per second and this slashed phone bills — a very large number of customers make calls for 30-40 seconds but used to get billed for a full minute. Once the newcomers announced this, the existing firms were forced to follow suit.
And now Tata Teleservices has gone one step forward. It has said that customers will be compensated if it fails to meet pre-determined levels of service standards. So, if there are three call drops in a month, just by way of example, the customer will get paid a certain amount of money. The same will happen to other areas. All of this, it is very possible, may not add up to much by way of compensation, but it will get the company so much goodwill since no other firm does this. This is akin to the recall of cars by Maruti Udyog — the cost of the recall is relatively small but everyone who buys a Maruti now feels reassured that the company will take care of their problems.
Anjali Malhotra, New Delhi
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