BSNL to train 30k employees on customer service

 As state-run telecom player BSNL comes closer to the full fledged launch of its 4G mobile services, the firm has set in motion a plan to train about 30,000 employees to make the telco a customer focused organization.

The objective is to improve customer satisfaction and ensure effective response to their complaints. Under the plan, about 12,000 employees have already been trained as customer facing staff, K Rajaraman, Secretary, Department of Telecommunications told ETTelecom.

The plan is being executed under the government’s Mission Karamyogi project. The total number of employees working in BSNL is 60,000.
who are customer facing, basically sensitizing them about how to improve customer satisfaction, to ensure effective response to their complaints. All this will have some effect a couple of years down the line,” he said.

The Mission Karamyogi is centred around three pillars one – behavioral competency, functional competency which cuts across all different verticals and domain competency where training on latest technologies will also be done, Rajaraman said.

The rollout of 4G by BSNL is expected to start this October and a full fledged launch is expected in the next 18-24 months. Recently, a Group of Ministers (GoM) approved the deployment of 1 lakh sites for the rollout of BSNL’s 4G network by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)-led consortium. The 4G equipment – indigenous telecom stack – deployed by BSNL will be upgradable to 5G with just a software upgrade. This will also boost India’s Atmanirbhar vision.

In June, the struggling telco received the third revival package with allotment of 4G and 5G spectrum worth Rs 89,047 crore. The total debt of BSNL has come down to Rs 22,289 crore from Rs 32,944 crore.

Earlier, the government had provided a revival package worth Rs 69,000 crore for BSNL and MTNL in 2019, while the second package worth Rs 1.64 lakh crore was announced in 2022. Since 2019, the government has provided support worth Rs 3.22 lakh crore to the state-run firm as part of three rescue packages.

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“The reform packages for BSNL have come in three bits. Everything was planned, just that planning takes some time,” the telecom secretary said.

Though BSNL's financial position has also been deteriorating for a long time and launch of 4G could be a big revenue generator. The telco expects a 20% increase in revenue after a full-fledged commercial launch of next-generation 4G services in 2023-24.

The launch of 4G for BSNL comes at a time when two private telecom players Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel have been on an aggressive 5G launch spree. Both Jio and Airtel launched their 5G services in October last year. While Jio aims to have pan-India 5G presence by December 2023, Airtel aims to cover all urban areas and 7,000 towns and 100,000 villages by March 2024.