Data from India’s telecommunications regulator (Trai) has revealed that the country’s largest carrier Bharti Airtel has the greatest number of unsatisfied customers.
India’s minister for communications and information technology Sachin Pilot said that the regulator had received consumer complaints about mobile operators that related to billing, metering, tariff and activation of chargeable value-added services without the customer’s consent.
Over the last three years, Trai had received more than 3,570 complaints from Bharti Airtel subscribers, more than 1,890 from Vodafone Essar customers and 2,100 from Reliance Communications subscribers. Tata Docomo and Idea Cellular had 1,239 and 925 complaints filed against them respectively.
According to Trai, Bharti Airtel topped the complaints table every year since 2008.
The Deccan Herald reported that Trai had forwarded the complaints to each operator to take action.
“Every customer complaint is important to us and we do address each of these at a customer and systemic level. However, it needs to be understood that the number of complaints referred here is mere 0.0025% of our active customer base.
“There is, in fact, declining trend in number of complaints over the period of time vis-a-vis growth of sub (read subscriber) base,” Bharti Airtel said in a statement to the Economic Times.
January 2011 figures from Trai pegged Bharti Airtel’s subscriber base at 155 million, followed by Reliance Communications at 128 million. Vodafone Essar had 127 million customers.
Based on these figures, Bharti Airtel’s proportion of disgruntled customers doubles that of Reliance Communications and Vodafone Essar.