As a user/consumer of reliance big tv dth services at home bearing smart card no. 200511906888 (another dth service sun direct installed on second tv with smart card no. 41055115301 which is better only in relative terms) and based on my unpleasant personal experiences for a long time and unilateral & unfair trade practices indulged by the operators like reliance.
I find serious deficiencies in the following areas which the service providers are not interested to address in first place, essentially due to lack of proper regulation by the government & absence of established service standards and grievance redressal mechanisms. Additionally there are several issues and practices which are unfair to the consumers, which should be put to public debate by trai on their website (similar to the practices of other regulators like sebi ) prior to framing a regulation for government approval which is big need of the hour in view of explosive unregulated growth in this area putting consumers to a great hardship and unfair disadvantage.
Absence of accountability in service: evidenced by their total disregard to customer complaints made even by e-mails. Even call centres are ineffective in resolving basic issues and indulge in buying just more time, refuse to provide tracking complaint number on several types of common grievances quoting their company policy and believe in verbal assurances which do not offer any kind of traceability & accountability to the consumers. The strategy is ‘indifference & inaction is the best medicine for handling grievances’ as the consumers are bound to be fed up and lose interest in settling issues due to lack of time & resources . Infact most of the dth providers push the customers to their call centres (many of them are not even toll free) which in many cases take more than 5-10 minutes for initiation of conversation with call handlers & serves as a best medium lacking transparency as compared to e-mails & ivr channel offered by some players. Lack of documentation on websites on complete fine print , terms & conditions in pack/channel offers is another big issue.
arbitrary deduction of voucher balances & lack of post-paid plans with billing systems: the deductions in voucher credit balances are many times made without proper authorisation & consent and the helpless consumers cannot even keep a track of the deductions and the reasons for such deductions as no written statements are issued periodically atleast by the cheapest option of e-mails or even as a statement pull option from their websites against customer logins are not made available which. The unfair practices like continued debit of charges for packages beyond the opted / requested no. Of months , for convenient reasons like absence of negative consent etc which is highly illogical. The post paid plan options with monthly detailed bill along with prepaid plans with online bill pullout facility or monthly e-mail bills should be made mandatory to address this. The telecom sector is the role model to follow atleast in case of post paid plans
Al a carte offering of channels in addition to the bouquet offerings: there should be a clear regulation in this regard to spell out individual channel prices as an additional option apart from the usual packages of the operator to truely bring the benefits of addressible systems down to the consumers, though a minimum monthly cash outgo to the operators can be prescribed provided the subscription for any given month has been requested for by the consumer based on ones convenience/priority
Lack of interoperability of set top boxes to switch between operators as per choice: keeping the technical feasibilities aside, the issue was already designed by the operators in their favour due to lack of regulation and also by designing term & conditions unilaterally in their favour by offering stbs not on ownership basis inspite of charging good amount of money as initial cost which making a subscription, which needs to be address atleast now by the regulator protecting the consumer interests. The bare minimum cost of the sim card has already brough this consumer revolution in telecom industry where operators are switched as per suitability of terms to the different classes of consumers. The issue of technical feasibility through isi needs to be expedited to frame a regulation in this regard.
Lack of norms in hardware replacement/relocation/repair charges: the issue needs a closer look in view of booming dth industry to maintain some uniformity.
This is high time trai and the government provide an effective regulation to protect all the stakeholders suitably