Fixing a mended net service firm

TECH TALK

Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL), the erstwhile Indian federal government-controlled international telecoms carrier, must make Arun Shourie cringe.

The sale and management control of the navratna to the Tatas for nearly $300 million "� Bombay House spent an additional $237 million on a public offer "� was among the highpoints of his stewardship of India's privatisation programme.

But since the government's exit (except for a residual 26 per cent stake that New Delhi holds), VSNL has been, to put it mildly, through the wringer.

The company's core business of international voice services has been under pressure with newcomers like Data Access and Bharti Telesonic forcing it to drop rates.

At the same time, new technologies "� read, voice over IP "� have been putting pressure on the pricing brains at VSNL. The company's share price more than halved in May this year since February 2002 (it's been recovering since).

If that was not all, VSNL's internet access services also had its share of hiccups. From the beginning of this year, some 10 months after the Tatas took over the company, the VSNL service went pedestrian with a vengeance.

For the first time since 1998 when I signed on for the company's internet offerings, I suddenly found access extremely erratic, speeds pathetic and even message delivery unreliable.

I, in Bangalore, was not alone. Subscribers to the service "� now rebranded Tata Indicom "� across the country were furious at the deterioration.

Hate mails surged and discussion groups were flooded with posts from subscribers cursing their decisions to use a vsnl.com or vsnl.net ID for their business emails. There were several sniggers on how VSNL had gone down the tube with a private management and, that too, the Tatas.

The sorry state of affairs continued through the year (this is a customer's view of events and not supported by hard testing).

It got particularly bad in the July-September period when I would have to make two or three attempts to get connected. And, often, I'd get knocked out from the VSNL server and had to dial in again. VSNL's customer help desks were woefully inadequate in handling customer queries.

Things came to a head early in October when I suddenly found I couldn't access the service. I logged on to the VSNL site with a friend's account to find that my account had expired.

Normally, the VSNL servers push out a mail alerting subscribers when they have used 80 per cent of their accounts, but this was missed, leaving me out in the cold. It didn't help that I had urgent need to access the internet.

To cut a long story short, I decided to stop using my VSNL internet account and move to an alternate provider: Reliance Infocomm, which has a lower cost of access and provides significantly more value with mobility and better speeds.

So what went wrong? I'd been trying to interview the VSNL management since October for an insight into what had gone wrong with VSNL's act.

I finally got to speak last week with a senior VSNL executive, who requested he not be identified in this column. Here's his story: the VSNL internet offering, India's first, grew in a haphazard manner, developing its own messaging, mail management and billing applications and deploying multiple servers.

This architecture was not open to consolidation. So when a subscriber wanted an add-on email account or extra space, meeting that request involved multiple reconciliation of records.

To get rid of these 'legacy problems,' VSNL decided to overhaul its internet apparatus.

"We decided early this year that we will not continue this way and throw everything into the sea," the VSNL manager said.

"From February to June, we disbanded everything "� billing, messaging and other applications "� from local set ups in Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and other cities and moved everything to Mumbai."

In addition, from April the company set up a customer care centre in Mumbai and slowly started consolidating all customer interactions across 22 cities to just two centres: one in the Maharashtra capital and another in Hyderabad.

VSNL engineers also worked on 'customer optimisation' in terms of allocating more access numbers to callers from one area in a city and paring them in other parts.

In tandem, the VSNL internet retail sales and marketing team has been working on widening the reach of its distribution network through local groceries and kirana stores across the country and a tie up with ICICI Bank to use the bank's ATMs.

VSNL says the investment in new systems and customer service centres will start paying off in the future when it expands its offerings and subscribers will be able to access any service "� provided by the company and potentially other merchants "� with a single account.

That sounds interesting and I wish it luck. I would be even more glad if the company got its internet access service right and I could go back to using my VSNL mail ID.

Josey Puliyenthuruthel works at content company perZuade. His views are personal and may not be endorsed by his employer, the company's investors, customers or vendors. Comments may be sent to josey@perzuade.com