Service Level of Philippine Telcos

I maintain several mobile phone accounts, more by necessity than choice. My primary line has been my mobile phone number for years, all my friends, business associates and clients know this number. I just cannot let go of it. In addition, their BlackBerry service is better compared to their competitor’s.

My other provider offers relatively cheaper wireless broadband connectivity via HSDPA. My 3G-capable phone, connected to my laptop provides me with decent speeds at a low rate for every chunk of time I spend connected to the Internet.

My third line, I use mainly for cheap voice calls to other subscribers within their own network, with surprisingly great call quality.

I have had my share of problems with each of these providers, all for different issues, and it is such a pity that the level of service they provide me, an individual subscriber, is relatively poor compared to the service level I see them provide corporate customers.

Just yesterday, one of my providers cut off my mobile service because of non-payment of my bill whose cut off was February 21. Hello! I have not even received my bill yet! Actually, the real reason was because I exceeded my credit limit when I used it while roaming. With no prior warning, I was cut off. I asked them to restore my service since it was 12MN and I needed to use my phone. They declined. I was furious. Prior to my recent international trip, I requested that my credit line be increased in anticipation of my roaming charges. Apparently, my request was not granted but I was not told. The least they could have done was inform me beforehand that my service was about to be interrupted because my request for a credit limit increase was declined, and that I had almost consumed my limit. I got none of those.

My other provider actually cut me off while I was on roaming because I had exceeded my credit limit while away from the Philippines. Imagine the anguish of losing your service altogether, even unable to receive calls or SMSes, while in a foreign country. I had to find a landline to call my wife back home to settle my bill. The nerve.

I am also in the process of disputing my BlackBerry charges, which have spiked to 19MB of usage for the previous month. This is abnormal compared to my usual 2MB-4MB of usage for the past several years. My provider has not reverted back to me, and I already received the following month’s bill still showing 16MB of GPRS usage. I expect to be in for a long discussion with them. Interestingly, this is the same precise reason why I discontinued my Blackberry service with my other provider, thinking this provider was better. In fairness, this issue with my current provider is only happening now after around 2 years of being on their BlackBerry service. Now, I am experiencing the exact same problem which we were not able to resolve with the other provider before.

Now, if these issues had happened to one of their corporate customers, things would have progressed differently. They would have been taken care of, things would have been explained to them patiently, and the whole problem would have been handled by a competent person. In fact, tokens would have also been likely offered to pacify the customer. Such is not the case now. 

They are afraid to lose a corporate customer, but not an individual subscriber. I wish they would smarten up and study the effect of thousands of irate individual customers to their bottom line as compared to losing a single corporate customer. Dissatisfied individual customers are ‘noisier’ than corporate professionals. But see how much resources they pump into the marketing and servicing of these corporate customers. I am sure you have noticed how difficult it is to obtain a new phone on retention unless you are a new subscriber, which of course are unheard of for corporate customers.

Now, the big question is, where do they derive more revenues from, individual post-paid subscribers or their corporate subscribers? Figures vary for each Telco, but you’ll definitely be surprised. 

Plus the fact that there are many individual subscribers, who are CEOs of big corporations or business owners, that simply refuse to transfer their accounts under the wings of their company. Why? Think information security and privacy…

These Telcos don’t always know how their individual subscribers relate to their so-called big ticket corporate accounts or how greatly they influence the purchasing process.

But alas, I am simply one of thousands of post-paid subscribers whom they can afford to ignore.