The Hindu Business Line : TouchTel to invest Rs 100 cr

TOUCHTEL, the fixed line telephone service from the Bharti Group, plans to invest Rs 100 crore in 2004-05 in Tamil Nadu. This will be on expanding capacity by one lakh lines and increasing the number of exchanges.

At present, Touchtel has a capacity of 2.57 lakh lines in Tamil Nadu, of which about 1.80 lakh lines are in Chennai. It has a subscriber base of 1.40 lakh in the State, with Chennai accounting for about one lakh connections.

According to Mr K. Krishnan, Chief Executive Officer (Tamil Nadu and Karnataka circles), TouchTel, some of the exchanges have reached a capacity utilisation of 55 per cent to 60 per cent. TouchTel has 100 exchanges in Chennai alone and plans to add another 30 to 40 exchanges next year, depending on the demand. At present, the average distance between an exchange and a connection is about 1.5 km, and by next year the company plans to reduce this to about 1 km.

TouchTel has estimated that its capacity would last for another three or four years, but would increase capacity as demand for new connections, especially those for the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service — which offers uninterrupted Internet access and simultaneous use of the telephone — is growing. About 3,000 to 4,000 subscribers were being added each month for the DSL service alone, Mr Krishnan said.

The TouchTel service is available in Chennai, Madurai, Tirupur, Vellore, Coimbatore and Pondicherry. The company was studying the market for launching its service in Tirunelveli, Tuticorin, Tiruchi and Salem next year.

Mr Krishnan said almost 90 per cent of the companies in Chennai had TouchTel connections. Their usage might vary from 10 per cent to 90 per cent, but about 50 per cent of traffic of the companies was through the Touchtel network. (Some of these companies had completely switched from BSNL to TouchTel connections, while some others retained both the services.)

He felt that the quality of service was a key differentiator between TouchTel and others offering fixed line services. The company had taken a number of steps to periodically monitor subscriber satisfaction and also audit the response time for the company to respond to complaints. For instance, it had launched a programme called "voice of the customer," where every one of its managers visited three to five customers every month to get their feedback. For companies, TouchTel provided a monthly report on telephone usage pattern and how problems were solved.

Mr Krishnan said a separate team was in place for service audit to cover all the contact points with a customer: a TouchTel showroom, a fault repair engineer and a salesman.

TouchTel had found that about 90 per cent of complaints broadly fell into four categories: telephone connection not working, disturbance on the line, billing errors and on value-added services. The company had introduced a software in its customer management system which threw up about a dozen questions whenever a customer called in with a complaint. Once these questions were answered, the system determined where the fault was and would send an SMS on the mobile phone to the engineer attending to faults in that area. The response time was thus being constantly brought down, Mr Krishnan said.

TouchTel's revenue from the Tamil Nadu circle would be about Rs 250 crore a year.

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