For 2 straight quarters: Jio fails to meet TRAI norms on customer satisfaction

Reliance Jio fared poorly in the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai) quality of service (QoS) norms which require a telco’s customer care centre to answer consumer complaints within a stipulated time.

Jio’s performance on this count has been found wanting for two successive quarters — October-December 2017 and January-March 2018 — as it did not meet the laid down criteria across all the 22 circles.

As per Trai’s QoS norm, when a subscriber calls his/her operator’s call centre, the call should be taken up by a service executive within 90 seconds and this should be the case for 95% of the calls that are received by call centres in all the telecom circles. It is here that Jio failed to meet the standards across all the circles in the two quarters.

While Bharti Airtel did not meet the stipulated norm in three circles during October-December and four circles in January-March 2018, Vodafone failed to meet it in three and five circles, respectively. Idea’s performance was the best on this count as it failed to meet the norm in only one circle each during the two quarters under review.

Sources in Trai said Jio’s performance in this regard is “worrisome” and the regulator has directed it to ramp up call centre operations at the earliest. Jio has assured Trai that it is working on the problem and will resolve it soon.

Jio’s call centres in the West Bengal circle met this parameter for 56.55% of the calls during October-December, but this deteriorated sharply to 18.90% during January-March 2018, while in Madhya Pradesh this rate declined from 60.24% to 22.25% during the same period.

Similarly in UP (East), the operator met this condition for 58.70% of the calls during the December quarter, but in January-March it could meet this norm for only 21.31% of the calls.

Likewise in UP (West), during October-December 2017 Jio met the norm for 58.12% of all the calls received by its call centres, but this number fell sharply to 20.54% in January-March 2018.

Analysts said for newer operators, adding large subscriber base such glitches do happen but operators should improve their performance. They also said compared to several incumbents who have an interactive voice response system to handle parts of complaints, Jio relies fully on customer executives taking the call and that perhaps could be the reason for their failure to meet the norms on this front.