Bharti Airtel, the second-largest telecom operator in India, had the most complaints from consumers in FY22. Airtel was followed by Vodafone Idea (Vi) and then Jio at the bottom of the list of private telcos. According to a PTI report, Devusinh Chauhan said that during FY2021-22, more than five crore complaints came in against the private telecom operators. Out of this, most of the complaints were against Bharti Airtel (about 54%). In specific numbers, Airtel received a total of 2,99,68,519 complaints while Vodafone Idea received 2,17,85,460 complaints. Against Jio, which happens to have the largest subscriber pool, only 25.8 lakh complaints were registered. Now, this is an interesting figure because Airtel considers itself a premium operator. If that really is the case, how come Jio got severely fewer complaints as compared to Airtel during the year? Let’s not forget the nation’s telco, BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited). Chauhan mentioned that the number of complaints against BSNL and MTNL stood at 8.8 lakh and 48,710, respectively. What would have been interesting to see here are two things - a) what kind of complaints were mostly made to the operators, and b) how many complaints were followed up by the operators leading to consumer satisfaction? Airtel receiving the most number of complaints is a very surprising thing. Jio has at least 10x fewer complaints from the consumers in FY22. This means that Jio customers are either getting the best services or Jio customers are too lazy to register a complaint with the company’s helpline. Most likely, it is the former because, as per Opensignal, Jio has the best 4G availability and coverage in India, and according to TRAI MySpeed, Jio delivers the fastest internet speed in India. So, Jio is not only delivering the best coverage but also delivering the fastest internet browsing speeds. No wonder why Jio customers don’t have a lot of complaints.
