Challenges

Dear Customer of Ncell,

I hope you have enjoyed the warming temperatures and the new green grass, the sun and life in general. We at Ncell look forward to blooming of jacarandas, more surya of Nepal, warm spring days, Shiva’s birthday and the opportunity to serve you better.

Unfortunately, during last couple of weeks we have had lot of challenges: I am very sorry for the inconvenience caused by the defected scratch cards, delivered by our vendor from India. Many of you had to call us to get your account topped up; sure you do not like it, we do not like it but sometimes these things just happen. A BIG apology! The nasty consequence of this whole issue is that we cannot take care of your normal service needs as our call center is overloaded due to printing error of scratch cards! And at the same time, our people are under tremendous pressure with calls waiting, and too many of you have to wait too long to get through to the service agent.

Actions taken:

·       2.5M card’s quality checked in warehouse and quarantined

·       0.6M defective cards called back from market

·       The deal with the vendor is terminated and a new order has been placed with different company

·       40 agents were added in contact centre to handle the extra volume of calls

·       50% of back office team are retrieving PIN and recharging manually compromising the daily work

As you can see, we have had a crisis management in house. A BIG HAND to our customer relations people who have been working under such pressure and still, have been able to take care of other issues as well! It seems that next week the amount of effected cards in the market will be less and we (You and us) can get back to normal operations. Thank you for your patience dear customer!

The other challenge these days is the load shedding. Even though we have batteries, generators and hundreds of people taking care of our network maintenance, sometimes a site goes down. Typical reason is that long power cuts do not charge batteries properly and/or there is a fault in DG. When a particular site with antennas stop working, the neighboring site(s) takes over and handles the traffic. Sometimes there is so much traffic already that the ongoing call will drop and you have to call again or, the new site taking the traffic is so far that the signal weakens and the voice quality drops. Normally, we get these issues fixed in two-three hours but sometimes the fault can be back haul transmission. For transmission, we use microwave and fiber. Fiber is better of course and the capacity is super, but two weeks back we noticed that rats like it too: in two of our transmission hubs, these little creatures had eaten the surface of the cord and cut the fiber.

Although rats are more close to Lord Ganesh, wish you all a very good Shiva Ratri!

Yours,
Pasi

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Here for Nepal

Namaste!

Every now and then, I get involved in discussion on what does it actually mean to be “Here for Nepal” as our slogan states?

At the article, published by Kathmandu Post on Wednesday, you can read most of it in numbers:

http://www.ekantipur.com/2012/01/26/business/ncell-posts-122-percent-growth-in-revenue/347870.html

We also have had quite a bit of feedback in social media about other proposals for “Here for Nepal”. Some say "do that" or "do this" and then, you are really “Here for Nepal”: "share Golden SIM money to everyone, support transplants, build a tower in particular village, open up NTC controlled emergency numbers to Ncell customers, decrease prices to half etc". Some have even said that Ncell has seen as one of the NGOs bringing infrastructure to Nepal. Yes, we have build coverage to 90% of the Nepalese people, but in business terms.

Please have authentic customer feedback from last week, word to word:

“Thank you for the unimaginable advancement that Ncell has brought in this country, where telecom was considered privilege, accessible & affordable only to a certain class of the society, not many years ago. I congratulate and thank you, for this tremendous comfort you distributed in the society in totality. With success, comes people’s expectation and with this clings huge responsibility and accountability towards the consumers.” There we are, “Here for Nepal”.

If you look at the numbers in the Ekantipur news in the link above, it is telling part of the contribution in monetary terms. Our Finance people made a calculation on overall cash contributed to the Government of Nepal; the sum from last fiscal year ended up to 10 Billion Rupees! The 10B consist of all the taxes, government funds, license fees, frequency fees and import duties of equipments for Ncell. Yes, that is 10B of 17B revenues. Every increase in telecom density increases Gross National Product and economic activity of the nation; last year 2.7 Million new customers were able to get good connectivity through Ncell. Not bad. At the business sector, we have offered successfully new goodies for customers to get connected through the best network (here) in Nepal, BlackBerry and Pro plans. Ncell is also “Here for Business Customers in Nepal”. We launched the fastest internet in Nepal about one and half years ago and became the biggest ISP supported by the good customer experience. “For Nepal”,sure.

We employ directly 540 persons and indirectly, in service provision, about the same number of people. On top of that, about 40.000 families earn commissions at our distribution channel. In Corporate Social Responsibility, we have a strategy to get basic education available to more and more school age children: we adopt schools and donate our Connect-products to schools in order for them to have e-libraries in hand.

But as the customer feedback at above lines tells us: “With success, comes people’s expectation and with this clings huge responsibility and accountability towards the consumers.” Our trekking at the “Here for Nepal”-path has begun just three years ago. We know that we need to work harder to win more and more hearts and furthermore, give world class customer service to our customers.

Actually it is You, our valued customer, You enable us to be here “for You Nepalese”; 7 Million of YouJ. We are not yet there to say “Mission Accomplished” and stand still, instead, Himalaya trekking continues.

“Here for Nepal” -and proud of it!

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Quality Surveys

Namaste!

There was interesting news last Thursday when NTA published their annual quality survey. It was nicely quoted in main news papers, hope many of you had change to read the articles. As expected, Ncell was getting best scores but still, we have room to improve. There was also lively and good discussion at the press conference of NTA about the different approaches to the quality issue. NTA had actually made two surveys, one or the network quality and the other one for the perceived quality by subscribers. We did challenge both of them as we do our quarterly measurements with best available tools and sample, and the one by NTA was conducted with very little sample with normal handsets and furthermore,  it is made in August-September last year. We have been improving our quality month by month and we do actually meet NTA’s benchmark criteria already. In spite of continuous drive tests, the best test for local household level network quality is your assessment. To get your feedback easier to our processes, we have new email address for your perusal: emailus@ncell.com.np. Naturally, when we face the load shedding of 11 hours a day, 95% of quality failures are caused by power and right address for most of the feedback should be Nepal Electric AuthorityJ

As You as our customer are our most powerful authority and we constantly work to improve our quality for you, I’d also like to share with you the response that we gave to NTA. Please:

Subject: Response to the letter ref. no. 1928 regarding QOS survey  report

Regarding the annual survey for the customer perception about the NTA is really welcomed by Ncell, we are highly committed for the top customer experience.

At the same time we do not agree with the outcomes which has been concluded after the survey. We are very much open to NTA about the quality reports and we are sending them to NTA every quarter. Ncell is doing the survey among the entire network of 7 million customers, by using the highly sophisticated tools. In most of the cases, we have been above the benchmark level, which is completely contradictory with the NTA survey report. We have the saved log files and we welcome NTA expert for validation.

Hence we would like to request to have a look on following comments:

1. Ncell has disagreement on the process of making the NTA quality assessment.
1. Definition of range (it doesn’t show the differentiation of network quality with operators).
2. Does it meet the standard of measuring quality or quality assessment? For us, the method does not full fill good quality standards.
3. How about the quality of data and data validation? It should be transparent and available to all parties for validation.
2. NTA should differentiate between Network performance and customer experience measurement for Network Quality.  Having customer survey is not a valid quality measurement but rather an opinion survey. We have achieved all the Network Performance KPIs set by the NTA except POI congestion.
3. Ncell agrees with some survey data but not with all of it. (e.g it seems other operators’’ Call Set Up Success Rate is very much different when compared with our quarterly benchmarking result)
4. Ncell has defined the quality management process :
1. Daily Network Performance Monitoring using PMS (Results are  above the quality target except POI KPIs)
2. Daily calls testing using SIGOSS system. (Results are fine).
3. Quarterly Benchmarking which is real customer experience measurement in 8 cities and 3 main highways
4. Six Sigma KPIs being improved a lot and continuous improvement projects are being implemented. In November 2011, we reached one of the best network KPIs at TeliaSonera Group benchmarking with 20 different operators. So called DPMO (Defects Per Million Calls was at level of 7000 which is a standard in Nordic countries like Sweden and Finland.
5. We are open to share the quality status we are getting from the system and the process that we are following to maintain and improve quality in the network.

Summary about billing performance:

1.      Subscriber growth of Ncell proves that customers are satisfied with our service.

2. Questionnaires itself is not sufficient to collect proper information which would indicate the valid billing performance. It should be separate questionnaires for pre paid and post paid subscriber. Most of your questions suits only for post paid customers.
3. As per the survey report, there is the performance level below the 50% whereas it is 85% in Biratnagar. So it is contradictory itself because we have a common billing system for entire Nepal.
4. Approx we get 1M subscribers queries a month, out of which only 0.00006% is related with the billing.

Sincerely,

Pasi Koistinen
President and CEO

Ncell

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Roaming

Happy New Year to You all! Wish the 2012 will be healthy, prosperous and favourable to everyone in every possible aspect. Suba Kamana!

Lot of requests and questions have been raised regarding roaming, please find my blog this time about the international issues. Roaming is very versatile and sometimes complicated issue, hope you find the following usefull. Tried to write it as general language as possible.

Traditionally, Roaming is defined (cf. GSM Association Permanent Reference Document AA.39) as the ability for a cellular customer to automatically make and receive voice calls, send and receive data, or access other services, including home data services, when travelling outside the geographical coverage area of the home network, by means of using a visited network.

So, if you travel to India and use Ncell SIM there by accessing e.g. Airtel, you are roaming. At Ncell we have postpaid roaming but also prepaid roaming (also known as Camel roaming). If you are prepaid customer the number of destinations is limited to 7 countries and only limited to voice roaming. The reason for the limited offering is the fact that in prepaid, both network should have real time charging and it is not that easy to arrange when billing systems are different. If you want to have good roaming facility and in more parts of the world, have the Pro schemes (post paid/paid in advance) with Ncell: we have roaming agreement with 249 operators in 87 countries for voice roaming, and 187 operators and 67 countries for data (GPRS) roaming.

Before you travel, have enough credit at your account, minimum of 10,000 NRS per week of roaming, according to our system. If do not want to use roaming, switch off the roaming in the settings of your phone. The rules between operators have been agreed so that as the caller is not able to know the location of the receiver, the receiving party pays the international part of the call. Means: you pay. According to the tariffs of the local network; the settlement is done between Ncell and foreign operator on monthly basis. You pay us and we pay the foreign operator. The caller in home country pays normal domestic tariff. Example: you as Ncell mobile customer call to your cousin in New York having Ncell SIM roaming at AT&T mobile network. You pay our normal rate 1.99 plus tax, your cousin pays as per the roaming tariff.

If you want to use data and/or mobile internet (also called as GPRS in telecom jargon) for your emails when abroad, we recommend using public Wi-Fi networks or Wi-Fi at hotels which has a fixed fee. No roaming charges. Settings at your phone to Wi-Fi on, and data roaming off. If you want to read your emails through your mobile phone, put the data roaming on instead but be prepared to pay for charges according local operator. By the way, the beauty of the BlackBerry phone is data compression: it uses only 10% of the data compared to other phones so reading emails while roaming is handy and cost effective. But please do not start surfing in the Internet that will cost you a lot! Actually, surfing at the Internet while roaming is the single biggest reason for huge bills; people often do not realize the fact so if you have Ncell Connect with roaming facility, do not put the data card in the laptop to avoid any bills. If you need to, use with care!

We have dedicated team of Account Managers for business customers and if (hopefully) you are our Pro customer, our people are there to help and answer to your questions. Or please call Corporate Customer Care at 9007. My advice is: please, study roaming before travelling! Checklist:

·       Find the roaming operators in your visit country at http://www.ncell.com.np/pro/roaming/international

·       Decide if you want to use roaming or not

·       Study how to change settings at your phone, do the settings before you leave Nepal

·       Have enough credit at your account

·       When arriving your destination country, be sure that you have desired settings at your phone

o   If you are not sure, keep it shut down or be prepared to pay the billJ

·       Sometimes you have to use Manual Search of the network to find the roaming operator

Enjoy your trip!
Regards,
Pasi

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The Santa Claus, or Father Christmas from Finland would like to wish You, and everybody in Nepal a peaceful Christmas time and a Happy New Year!

According to Christmas tradition of Finland, you are supposed to be kind to your self, your friends, family members and actually, ALL the people! Thank you for following Ncell CEO blog and giving your valuable feed back to help Ncell to develop better services and top Customer Experience.

The blog continues again 1st of January with Roaming issues.

Regards,

Santa Claus and Pasi

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