Chennai: Cyclone Vardah and Chennai floods became a blessing in disguise for the cash-starved Chennai BSNL as its robust infrastructure has now helped the national player to attract lost customers from the private telecom sectors.
Administrators with BSNL, who have been experiencing a mass exodus of their customers to other private networks in the past are now happy as customers are returning back to BSNL.
A few years back the port in and port out ratio of BSNL was 1:3, that is BSNL getting one customer and losing out three to its rivals and now this trend has reverted and now it is 1:0.77 in 2016. After Cyclone Vardah the ratio improved 1:0.63 for the month of January and the good news is that the market ratio for BSNL is improving despite the fact that there is free Sims and service from others. In other words, in terms of service counts, the port in/port out counts are 1596/1232 and 1843 / 1169 for the past two months, BSNL sources said.
“Post-Tsunami, BSNL had a national disaster management guideline in place and this helped Chennai telephones to have an infra platform that could withstand disasters to some extent. During floods and cyclone, BSNL offered a better service and the restoration of damaged towers and cables were faster, this is helping us,” BSNL chief general manager S M. Kalavathi told DC.
Transparent billing and cost effective plans are our recent strategies to compete with private firms, the official said. STV 339 is an attractive plan with voice calls fully free of any network with a 1GB free data for 30 days.
The STV was introduced in January and has got an overwhelming response. In terms of count about 40000 customers have recharged till date for the month of Feb 2017, the CGM added.
The MNP (Mobile number Portability) is the crucial factor here and now the public has choices. Any day BSNL is a government sector where customers can lodge direct complaints in person, whereas private networks, attend to the complaints through a call centre and this is off late is an irritation to customers, opines V. Sathiabalan, former telecom advisor. Even in the case of STV 339 the public can avail an offer of another Rs 40 discount by typing STV COMBO339 and send it to 123 and this had also attracted new customers for BSNL, he added.
