Operators 'rely on lack of customer information'

Adrian Ciobanu, managing partner at Reimens, the first and so far only telecom services auditing and optimization firm on the Romanian market, tells BR the most frequent causes of discontent for its clients and what changes Reimens has in mind to resolve them.

Otilia Harga

How many people does your team include?

The team numbers 10 people but can vary depending on the projects under way. Some people are only called upon for certain projects. Some of them process bills, others centralize them and draft reports, others are specialized in legal matters and their job is to check the contracts. I am the only seller who has direct interaction with the client. We strive to maintain a small number of projects precisely because we want to have enough time to spend on each project. To look over thousands of pages of bills and check them is time consuming. Plus, at this moment there are not so many people able to do this job, because they need certain skills: they need to have worked in telecom to be able to tell how the system works and have experience with certain tariff plans. I am the only one who does the sales, negotiates for clients. Over the last four years, clients have approached us, but since the beginning of this year, I have started to target companies that fit a certain customer profile.

What turnover did you post last year and what are your estimations for 2011?

Last year, we posted a turnover of nearly EUR 50,000. In 2009, it amounted to EUR 40,000. The business grows on average 15-20 percent a year. It is hard to make estimations for this year because I never know what will happen in the next six months. In my case, I can double my turnover in two months. You don’t know what opportunities lie in a client’s telecom bill, and since we are paid with a percentage of the final result, what we will earn is anyone’s guess.

What are your customers’ most frequent causes of discontent?

A client who has migrated from another operator expects certain services to change on any of the following three levels. One is the technical aspect: the previous operator had technical issues with the network and the client expects the current provider not to have any. Another is the pricing: the client expects the current offer to be more advantageous. Thirdly, and most frequently, the account management is an issue. Unfortunately, most of our customers’ problems are related to this. While the quality of networks has aligned since providers have invested in their networks, and the pricing issue is fairly simple to evaluate, human interaction generates most problems.

What are the reasons for these human errors?

These have to do with the management of the telecom companies, some of which are very large and bureaucratic. There are all kinds of things that cause discontent, for instance the very late implementation of an offer, negotiations that drag on forever, contracts that do not arrive from the operator for over a month because a whole array of managers need to sign them.

In other companies, other problems appear. Account managers are under extreme financial pressure: their targets have hiked, more than the market can take, with the aim of decreasing their earnings. This generates a great deal of frustration and abnormal behavior.

What I come across very frequently is that operators oblige their clients to sign up for some services they do not need. The reason is that they need to meet their targets and figures. This is a market anomaly at the moment.

From the point of view of the quality of the labor force, the situation is very bad. People who were trained by Connex and Dialog were very well paid and trained and a lot was invested in them. This showed. Nearly all the people recruited between 1998 and 2000 are successful professionals. Now, workers migrate from one operator to another and feel out of place because they are not well paid or trained, because not as much is invested in them.

What causes errors on customers’ bills?

Lack of attention is one cause, but not the only one. Due to cost reductions, teams in all departments were downsized, including the department in charge of implementing offers or contract modifications. People working there also have targets and are overloaded. Over the past four years, we have audited more than 100 companies and in 70 percent of the cases, we found bill implementation errors.

Have you sent proposals to the authorities?

We sent a set of proposals to increase transparency on the telecom market to ANCOM a year ago, but nothing has happened yet. The telecom law must be debated this year so probably such a discussion has not yet been on the agenda. But I expect something to happen.

Operators rely a great deal on clients’ lack of information and negotiation skills. Of course, we are talking about the majority of the market, not the 10 percent of businesses who have informed people in Romania.

For instance, there are operators who offer packages with included credit. When looking at the bill, if you have not surpassed your credit, you do not see the tariffs or the minutes you consumed. What kind of transparency is that? There are obstacles placed in the path of clients.

Another proposal we made was that there should be no limit to the number of unused minutes rolled over from one month to the next, throughout the contract. Furthermore, we proposed that when the tariff plan changes, the minutes or the credit that had been rolled over until that point should not be lost when the new tariff plan comes into force.

Another proposal is that operators should post the value of the phone call on the bill, even if it is zero. In this way, you can check if the tariff plan is being implemented correctly, which at the moment you cannot always do.

An additional proposal stems from the fact that there are clients, especially end users, who pay even more after the “re-negotiation” of their contract. There is a precedent created by a firm in Europe, which gives you the possibility to modify the tariff plan within three months if the costs you have now are higher than before. I think this is the right thing to do. In Romania you generally cannot do it, there are even restrictions on modifying the tariff plan for six months.

Some errors on customers’ bills date back one to two years. Maybe telecom providers should also be fined for these errors (just as customers are fined for being late in paying their bill) with a percentage that is applied to the time span in which they kept the client’s money in their accounts. If I pay a penalty for being late in paying my bill, why shouldn’t they pay for their errors?

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