Paying for Customer Care - Indian Telco's New Route to Revenue ethical?

If you have noticed, Airtel, a top Telco in India, has started charging its Customers for Customer care calls at the rate of 50p/3 minutes, a service which used to be free of charge.

Although this will definitely generate a lot of revenue (given that Airtel has significantly more than 110M subscribers) is it really ethical for a Telco to charge its Consumers. It may be perfectly legal but would it be ethical?


One may say that its perfectly ok to do say just like we purchase a product and we pay if it gets faulty.

To understand the question we need to understand the differentiation between a Product purchase and a Service purchase.

When you buy a product, you purchase the product accepting that it being a physical entity, will deteriorate in functionality and eventually need servicing or repair. Customer accepts the
liability that the amount he is paying to purchase is the price of the product.

Now consider that you buy a Guaranteed/Warranted Product for say 5 years. In this case you are buying the product and also a invisible service that, all damages (covered in the warranty) will be replaced or fixed at no cost to the customer. Do you pay for warranted products that get defective under its warranty? No.


Similar to the above, Telcos are predominantly service sellers. When you purchase a Billing Plan for example to make calls, it becomes a liability of Provider to allow you to make calls at all times. In simple terms, the Service Provider is liable for the availability of the service where as a Consumer is only liable to pay for the consumption of such a service. (unless there is a contractual maintenance charge)

It is very unethical and perhaps should be illegal to charge your customers to report issues arising due to failure of the Service provider to make a service available.


I shall share a simple experience I had that led me to writing this post.

I am an avid GPRS user, and when I saw that airtel is providing 2GB internet bandwidth for a measly rental of Rs. 99 per month, I immediately wanted to activate the service.

The website was very elaborate on providing information on how to activate the service. I did all the steps, recieved a confirmation SMS twice that the service is now active.

I then started to use my GPRS leisurely thinking that I will only be charged 99 for under 2GB bandwidth which is a lot for a mobile phone. I was only shocked to notice that in my bill that followed for that month, there was no rental applied of 99 and was actually charged the precise usage of bandwidth.

Confused i called up the 'Chargeable' customer support, who informed me (after first wasting time probably to get the minutes rolling) that the service is not active at all. I told her the dates on which i recieved the confirmation but the lady said that the service is just not active. Eventually i asked her to activate it and she said it will be done so (i hope).

This entire experience may have cost me Re. 1 and may be a few hundered rupees extra that i may have paid for my leisurely use of GPRS under my understanding that the service is active.


There are 2 Seperate issues here.

I may to a certain extent agree that due to some system issue it service may not have got activated and it is acceptable to me as a consumer (obviously it will leave a bad experience in my head with Airtel)

However, charging me to let them know that they have committed a mistake or their system has erroneously done something is bad, unethical and to me illegal as well.


Re. 1 as an individual does not look much. But think about the volume the Telcos is earning. Even if you assume that an Operator with 100+ million subscribers, has 1% people (which is very low assumption) that have issues regularly and may need customer support.

Also assume to a pessimistic value that your call will indeed be over in 6 minutes or Re. 1. (we all know how long it takes working with the Call Center Executives for Telecom Operators trying to make you wait for ages)

The calculation is

1 Million Consumers(1,000,000) X Re. 1 = 1 Million Rupees per day.

Thats a Massive Revenue of Rs. 30,000,000 (Rs. 30 Million) per month and
Staggering Rs. 360,000,000 (Rs. 360 Million or more than Quarter of a Billion) an year.

Think about it.

All this revenue from a user who only wants to highlight that he is not getting the service he paid for!