The blueprint of telecommunication industry

Service Encounters/Moments of truth in telecommunication industry:

Types of Service Encounters

Remote Encounters

Phone Encounters

Face-to-Face Encounters

It is a critical point of contact by which a customer will judge the quality of an organization. For a telecommunication industry there are various points of contact for a customer with the company. They are: 1. Customer care: When the customer faces some difficulties in terms of service provided or need some help they call to customer care. The response given by the company has a lot of impact. 2. Retail outlets: There is lots of retail outlets where customers go to get SIM, recharge etc which becomes a touch point for the customers. There are several organized and unorganized retail outlets in this segment. The type and quality of customer service the retailers provide makes a sort of perception in the mind of customers. 3. Market research: When an employee goes for a market research he sometimes needs to make the customers what the product is so while the employees do this type of research along with it also creates brand awareness, brand recall also influences the consumer sometimes. 4. Service calls: During service calls the service provider tries to influence the customers with the attractive service plans, tariffs etc. The experience of delivery and interest in products can sometimes be considered as a moment of truth

Pricing Strategy:
The Indian Telecom story has caught everyones attention the world over. The number of subscribers in India has crossed the half a billion mark, next only to China1. Along with the subscribers, the number of operators in India has also increased. The
entry of new service providers, with MTS & Uninor being the most recent and the operators pursuit for a stronghold in the telecom market has led to tariff based price wars for attracting new customers.

Evolution of Pricing in the Indian Telecom Industry

The pricing in the Indian mobile service providers industry evolved over three phases, with call charges steadily falling through the phases

Indian service providers pricing evolved over three phases. The first phase was an introduction phase, from 1995 to 2000. The incoming and outgoing calls were priced around Rs 14/minute, which made the service a luxury, attracting significant snob appeal. Eventually the outgoing call prices dropped to Rs 9/ minute and incoming to Re 1/minute (towards the end of this phase), attracting a greater segment of the population. Thereafter, in the Growth phase which lasted from 2000-2005, the outgoing call rates dropped to Rs 2/minute while the incoming calls became free of charge. Many new players entered the market during this period, such as Reliance, which set new benchmarks for pricing. Following an aggressive strategy to attract a huge customer base, Reliance forced other operators to change their plans according to its offerings. Interestingly, what followed is the maturity phase where Tata Docomo used the 1p/second billing to gain entry into the crowded market. Tata Docomos strategy is reminiscent of

Reliances pricing strategy from the growth phase. The other operators reluctantly followed suit and added per-second billing plans to their existing product portfolio. This is one of the reasons for the crowding seen in Airtels postpaid plans, among others, as it continues to offer per-minute billing options also.

Price Plans
The biggest driver of growth in telecom industry is the development of pricing plans catering to individual needs and requirements of people at the prices they are willing to pay. A plethora of price plans are available today such as prepaid, postpaid, lifetime validity, Closed User Groups, corporate plans or some combination of these. We will restrict our analysis to the postpaid plans as they exhibit individual usage patterns and preferences, which govern the prepaid and Closed User Group plans. We consider the price plans of two service providers at the extreme ends of evolution, Airtel & Tata Docomo. We analyze the prepaid plans of these two subscribers in Mumbai Circle for product line structure, difference across products for different usages and then compare them to international players AT&T and Verizon for positioning.

Employee role in service delivery:

Employees play a very important role in service delivery in telecom sector. One of the reasons for selecting a particular service provider is customer service. The service does not involve only solving technical issues but also involves talking properly and delivery of service in minimum waiting time. Also the product till it reaches to customer has to deal with different types and levels of employees in different terms like retailers, dealers, managers, customer care etc.

Marketing Strategy in telecommunication Industry:

Telecommunication industry companies have the following characteristics:

1. Intangible nature. Service is invisible. Services being purchased previously seen or touched, hear and smell not to. The buyers can not touch this nature in order to reduce the uncertainty caused; they must seek to sign or evidence of the quality of service. They will see the place,

personnel, equipment, communication materials, symbols and prices, etc., to determine the quality of service. Therefore, the service provider's mission is "management of evidence", of the intangible tangible. "and services are subject to the challenge of marketing is to ask them to increase physical evidence. If we want to make our service fast and efficient corporate look, we should try the following tools to make this tangible positioning strategy.

2. Inseparability. Both production and consumption of services is generally the same time. Because the customer was present when the service provided and customer interaction is a feature of services marketing, both provider and customer service results are affected.

3. Variability. Service of great variability because the service provided depends on who, when and where available. For control of the quality of services can take two steps: first, investment in staff and excellent selection training. The training of service providers, it appears the customer can make the appropriate response to various situations, thus reducing the variability of services, the second step, through customer suggestions and complaints systems, customer surveys and contrast purchase customer satisfaction tracking to understand the situation. In this way, the poor quality of service and can be detected out to be correct.

4. Perishable nature. Service does not have to storability. Its production process itself is the process of consumption, and thus easily lost. Because service companies have the above characteristics, in the service of enterprises, Customer service quality is not the face of stability and a more varied service providers, and service providers not only by the impact, but also by "private" production process. and therefore the marketing services business requires not only the traditional markets marketing, but also inserted two other marketing, the internal marketing and interactive marketing. Internal marketing and interactive marketing constitute the modern marketing - full marketing i.e. the focus of marketing is full of marketing.