In an effort to tighten its leash over the telecom operators in the country, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has decided to launch its own call quality-rating app, MyCall, which will work on a crowd-sourcing platform.
“We’re leveraging crowdsourcing as we want consumers to assess the quality of a call. India has 1.2 billion mobile phone users, and even if a small part of them can provide us feedback, it will be good data,” said RS Sharma, TRAI Chairman.
As of now, there is no mechanism for the mobile subscribers to input their feedback related to call quality parameters like clarity, call drops, call failures, etc. This new app will help the subscribers share their experience with the regulator and hence will help increase the call quality offered by the telecom operators in the long-run.
The MyCall app will also help improve the ‘Do Not Disturb’ (DND) mechanism for improving the overall customer experience. The app would also have the ability to alert the subscribers about possible spam text messages.
MyCall app would allow the users to choose the number of calls they want to rate. The rating would be out of five, where one-star rating would mean worst experience and five-star rating would indicate excellent experience.
The subscribers would have the freedom to rate either all calls or a small percentage of them. In order to make the shared data useful for any analysis, the subscribers will have to share the location where it is indoors/outdoors or a specific geographic location.
According to the telecom minister, the government would be keeping a close watch on all the parameters related to call drops measurements.
A recent report indicated that the call drop has come down by 7% from 64% in Dec-2016 to 57% by the end by Mar-17. So even though a 7% improvement in call drop issues sounds good to hear, there is still a tremendous scope for improvement. The government is helping Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) to identify black spots and plan new sites for improving the services.
Speaking on the sidelines of the TRAI’s bi-decadal seminar on broadcasting, TRAI Chairman announced that the MyCall app would be launched by the month end.
MyCall app would work on the same principles as the TRAI’s MySpeed app, which collects data from the mobile subscribers related to mobile data speed, latency, and location.
The data collected via these apps covering parameters like data speeds, tower-wise call drop rates and signal strength and network utilisation would be made available for third-party use (researchers and other agencies) via the TRAI’s analytics portal.
To top all that, the Department of Telecommunications has also set up an automated system that makes calls to random subscribers for checking the status of call drops. Apart from getting the customer feedback about call quality, the system is also helping the government identify blind spots and areas with weak mobile signals.
This is a great move by the regulator for improving the call quality across all telecom operators. Don’t you think?
