A Romantic Realist

Love and Hate in Airtel Land

Ever been in that interesting situation where you love a company's ad but don't quite like its products or services? That is the state of my relationship with Airtel.

I have used Airtel as my mobile phone/blackberry/home wireless DSL service provider for just over two years now, ever since moving back to New Delhi. Since then, I have fallen in love with their ads, especially the ones airing now where a clearly in-love couple, actors Vidya Balan and R Madhavan, have verbal duels in a train from a taxi and in their apartment, the conversation centering around payments that can all be done through the Indian phone company's mChek mobile payments service. And I think Airtel's signature jingle, composed by A.R. Rehman, is ubiquitously catchy and they do use it well.

It is also tough to not admire entrepreneur Sunil Mittal's tremendous achievement: Airtel is not just India's largest mobile phone company in terms of subscribers but nowin the top five in-country mobile operators in the world.

But, the warm, fuzzy feeling I get toward Airtel on coming across their ad on television evaporates numerous times on any given day. Take Wednesday July 23 for example and the two Airtel SMS I got:

Airtel Jul 23, 2008 3:10:23 PM

Welcome to Airtel UP & Uttrakhand. Enjoy reduced Roaming rates with all incoming & local outgoing calls while roaming at Re1/min & all STD calls at Rs1.50/min.

Airtel Jul 23, 2008 3:18:57 PM

Welcome to Airtel Haryana. Enjoy reduced National Roaming rates with all incoming & local outgoing calls while roaming at Re1/min & all STD calls at Rs1.50/min.  For assistance kindly SMS or call 121.

No, I wasn't making a mad dash from state to state with my friendly Airtel mobile service keeping up with me when these messages showed up on my blackberry. I was simply sitting in my middle-of-New Delhi high-rise office. This isn't a freak occurrence either, by the way. Several times a week, Airtel decides I am in UP & Uttrakhand even when all I am doing is perhaps motoring around South or Central Delhi.

So, I have to ask myself. Would I trust my payments to a company that constantly misplaces me? And does this mean their billing systems are so messed up that maybe I am being charged for roaming even when I am not?

Meanwhile, unlike the romantic couple in the Airtel ad who, despite seemingly quite well off, still use pre-paid talk time (I didn't say all the ads made sense, I just said they push my buttons), I am, thanks to a lot of real life roaming though almost never in UP, Uttrakhand or Haryana, what I would venture to guess a pretty valuable customer for Airtel. Between November and June, for instance, my total mobile bill was at least Rs113,459, or on average about Rs14,000 a month. And, that too, not counting any of my personal calls. Guess what the average Airtel consumer spends? For the quarter ended July, Airtel's so-called ARPU, or average revenue per user, per month, was Rs350! 

Ok, I am not expecting red-carpet treatment but, would certainly like a few less dropped calls; a service that isn't abruptly turned off when I touch some pre-determined monthly limit (doesn't their computer show how much I pay and how regular my payments have been in the last two years?); and Airtel text messages that don't transport me across state lines when I am not really on the move.

Stop whining, just switch to, say, Vodafone India, you say?

Only problem is that at a recent lunch in Delhi, Vodafone Group Plc's outgoing CEO Arun Sarin noted how the average spectrum (the bandwidth that phone companies use to transmit signals) allocated to a company in US was 20 MHz while it was about 6 MHz in India. Stripped of the tech-speak, this means, Sarin explained, that the number of customers per MHz in India is now the highest in the world.

Basically, as he handed off the reins of Vodafone and headed into the Himalayas for some trekking, hopefully minus his cell phone, Sarin was essentially telling me it doesn't matter how much you spend in India, your general quality of service and dropped calls, and customer service snafus will be about the same as most of India's "missed call class" as Mint columnist S Mitra Kalita aptly dubbed those growing millions among us who can afford mobile phones but, really can't afford what the monthly service costs in a recent column.

What is even more daunting is that India remains one of the fastest growing mobile phone markets in the world and the government expects there will be 500 million mobile phone users by 2010 up from about 287 million now and going up by about 8.94 million subscribers in June 2008 alone.

The good news is some extra bandwidth is coming if India's telecom minister, the DMK's A. Raja, can figure out the most profitable way he can try and "sell" it. The bad news is that it doesn't look like customer service is really top of priority as all the phone companies rush to grab new users. Indeed, Indian consumer venting sites, such as Mouthshut.com, list a litany of woes against all the providers. For instance, Airtel gets an average of just two of five stars based on 530 reviews while Vodafone India does no better in 286 reviews.

Part of Airtel's mission and promise is that it would "deliver what we promise and go out of our way to delight the customer with a little bit more." Don't you think it would be great if they actually delight the customer with a little bit less: of dropped calls, weird text messages and better customer service? Of course, a little bit more of those great Airtel ads are always welcome.

What can I say? I guess I am still a sucker for great ads and lousy service.