Calling customer care? It may not be toll free

Mumbai: Dev Burman (name changed), a Vodafone customer for six years, is furious with the service. The company is charging 50 paisa per three minutes of a call to customer care. “Have you ever thought of paying for talking to a customer care executive?” Burman said, giving vent to his anger.

The story is the same with other mobile service providers. Ketan Ramachandran, a Bharti Airtel subscriber, said: “Customer care is a service a telecom operator should offer free. Airtel’s interactive voice response system is very tardy and you have to talk to a customer care executive to get an issue sorted out. But now we have to pay for that!” The government’s directive to telecom companies while giving out licences explicitly stated customer service calls should be toll free.

The directive hasn’t changed — the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has not yet approved the companies’ request to charge subscribers for customer-care calls.

But the freebies are insidiously, gradually disappearing as hyper-competition is driving down mobile operators’ profits.

Over the last two years, the race to grab subscribers has become so intense that telcos started charging as low as 1 paise per pulse per call.