BSNL CGM plans to win back customers

Chennai: Ms S.M. Kalavathi assumed charge as chief general manager of BSNL-Chennai Telephones recently. She is the first woman to assume the post in the country and the third to enter the Indian Telecom Service. In an interview to Deccan Chronicle, she says her top priority will be to minimise complaints by enhancing quality of service and bringing back customers who had migrated out of BSNL network.

Q) Every person who assumes charge as CGM will have plans for the company’s development. What will be your contribution?
My topmost priority will be to improve BSNL’s revenue for which we need to minimise complaints, including complaints of signal coverage from cellphone towers. We also have some long-pending complaints. We will attend to them as one of our priorities as several customers want BSNL connection.

Q) How do you plan to achieve this?
We will first look at localities where we get more complaints and rectify them on a war-footing. Each division has been asked to identify one sub-division where they have more complaints and address them immediately. After that we will be able to focus on developmental aspects.

Q) What are your other priorities?
We want to bring back all customers who have moved out of our network. We (BSNL) have introduced countrywide free calling facility from 9 pm to 7 am. We now have the facility for 71 tariff plans in land line. We will ask our corporate office to extend the same facility to other popular plans, too. We now have 300 tariff plans. We want to extend it to other customers too. This is the biggest move which we are certain will bring our old customers back. We have witnessed 25 per cent to 30 per cent increase in STD traffic after the free night calling facility was launched.

Q) What is your plan to improve the quality of service in the mobile phone segment?
We now have 1,800 base transceiver stations (cell phone towers) in Chennai. We will be adding 250 more new 3G BTS in six months, besides replacing all old equipment in the core areas. This will enhance quality of service and improve data traffic. We have started using different technology and now we see our data traffic go up by 25 per cent in the last one week.  With this, we expect the data traffic to go up more than 50 per cent