The telecom watchdog is going to introduce a new benchmark with 13 key performance indicators to assess mobile phone operators’ service quality.
These KPI have been included in a draft guideline on the quality of service parameters.The guideline is likely to be approved today at a BTRC meeting.
Earlier, Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) drafted the guideline and received views from different stakeholders on it.
Generally, complaints are prevalent against the operators’ voice service in Bangladesh, said BTRC high officials while talking to the Dhaka Tribune on the quality of service.
Some common complaints include call failure, call drop and network disruption.
According to the draft guideline, the operators will have to ensure a call success rate of 75% to maintain the service standard. The guideline includes a provision to calculate call attempts and the success rate.
Parameters have also been included to fix congestion in network.
The operators are yet to introduce toll-free numbers to which the customers will seek help regarding the service.
The current customer care number 121 was supposed to be made toll-free, but the operators didn’t.
Instead, they made a separate number 158 toll-free as there was a BTRC directive to introduce charge-free customer care number. But the fact is that the customers are completely unaware of the number.
“Bangladesh is a very big market when size is taken into consideration. Sometimes we failed to protect users (from the operators’ bad service). Now we have to do something in this regard, though that should have been done much before,” said a high official of the BTRC’s Engineering and Operation Division.
The guideline also deals with the data service, saying that the operators will have to maintain at least 80% speed rate of offer announced.
The SMS attempts and success rate will also be measured by the KPI.
After taking the charge of BTRC, Chairman Sunil Kanti Bose at his first meeting directed the officials to have a look at the service guidelines of the regional countries. At that meeting, BTRC chief expressed his dissatisfaction over the service quality of Bangladesh’s mobile phone operators.
In Bangladesh, the customer complaints against mobile phone service are nothing new. Operators have customer service desks, but they apparently have failed to play an adequate role in solving the service problems.
The network disruption, call drops, delayed connection, poor voice quality, interconnection congestion, abnormal billing and delayed service responses from the customer care desks are the common complaints.
Bangladesh currently has more than 11 crore mobile users.
The quality of service parameter has been followed presently by the countries like Australia, India, Malaysia, Pakistan and Singapore.
BTRC earlier drafted a same guideline with the assistance from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
According to the previous guideline, the watchdog also planned to publish a rating of the operators every month. But they didn’t proceed later according to their plan.
A BTRC official said: “We can go hardline on the private operators, but there would be a problem with the state-owned Teletalk which doesn’t have any real time customer care centre or anything like this.”
The regulator sources said the guideline didn’t say anything about punishment for the violation and the regulator would need formation of rules to ensure punishments for violators and rewards for compliers.
