Both Airtel and Hutch have started taking advantage of being brands. Both have severe billing problems. Hutch was good for me except that they did not give me the discounts I paid for. And I had to fight with them every time for this. I did not get even a single error-free bill from them. When I told them to disconnect my service, they did not even send me a final bill. Some day, I'll sue them. Airtel was good initially but they also became complacent. With a pathetic customer service (their CCEs do not understand the t of telecom), it is a wonder they charge so much. And the less said about connectivity, the better. Both these companies are examples of bad brand management. They exist because we do not have choice. Idea is a hundred times better then either of them but they score low on connectivity. Reliance is not reliable enough. BSNL has bad reach.
If you want to compare airtell or hutch , the airtell will beat hutch straight away. The hutch camapaign of where ever u go our network follows is only limited to the Ad's. It didnt even have a proper coverage with in proper city limits of Bangalore, let alone the suburbs and the towns and villages.
Changing the cosmetics wont help them unless they increase the bandwidth,coverage and proper billing.
Whatever they may tom-tom about the rates or quality of service, none of the cellular operators have offered reasonable roaming rates. Airtel's roaming rates are one of the highest in this country!
Moreover, the subscriber has to bear the brunt of the cost of incoming or outgoing call. So, I have a suggestion to make, though it may or may not be technically feasible. I give the following scenario as an example:
Suppose a person is a subscriber in Andhra and a frequent roamer to Karnataka. Most of his contacts are in Karnataka. Prior to his travel into Karnataka border, he activates roaming.
When he has crossed the border and if there is an incoming call from Andhra, the calling party is informed by IVRS that since the subscriber is out of the state border, this call is bound to be an STD call. Press 1 to continue the call; press 0 to end the call.
Suppose the roamer is in Bangalore and makes a call to a mobile number in Bangalore, he is charged nearly Rs. 4 per minute. This discourages the subscriber from using the roaming. This kind of call should be treated as local and routed via the roaming network hub instead of the home network.
While the article is quite interesting from the corporate perspective. What customer has to say about customer friendly services. Atlhough I am an Airtel Customer, i feel that Airtel is not customer friendly viz a viz Hutch, Idea. Information with regards to servings offerings (like GPRS, etc) is not clearly communicated to customer thru Call centres, websites compared to competitors. I would rate Hutch and Idea much above Airtel in terms of customer friendliness and clarity of communication related to services.
One must have the fortune of getting into a problem with these "future companies" to realize what do they really stand for. When it comes to handling customer problems, these networks are no better than BSNL. the advantage with BSNL is that your expectations are moderate. Sophistication to Hutch and Airtel is limited to the attire of its employees, ability to speak English (most of it bad and ungrammatical) The more they try to look different, the same they end up looking. The rest is all bakwaas.
airtel caller tunes are used as a pretext to cheat the customers .they deducted 45 rs from my prepaid card .i complained but fell on deaf ears.i also have a hutch number but never had such experiences.airtel is a corporate thug,remember their accounting fraud.
Both Airtel and Hutch suck. i have been customers of both services and i found that they r as bad as BSNL. so when all 3 are bad, i chose BSNL because it is cheap. The thing is both Airtel and Hutch look after high-end customers. Other customers are all just a statistic to both of them.
The arguments presented here are quite irrelevant. It is common for the advertising industry to think they contirbute significantly to the success of a brand. May be in most instances but in this case it is quite simply not on. Given that 85% of new mobile subs are pre-paid , and go by the latest offer on hand (subject to network availability) it is laughable to suggest that an ad here or a color code there helps get/retain a mobile subscriber. Ad gurus, please wake up and smell some pheneol.
Airtel or Hutch will sustain their user base so long as they remain price competitive and maintain wide network coverage, Period. The pug and its pink colored tongue can take hike, prancing to the tune of Rehman's jingle
