Grameenphone is now set to launch a massive drive for recovering its outstanding bills worth around Tk100 crore from its 575,000 post-paid defaulted subscribers since its inception in 1997 through appointing an aggressive third-party.
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulator Commission (BTRC) has recently given the permission to appoint a firm for collecting the longstanding dues in response to an application sent by Grameenphone authorities.
The country’s leading mobile phone operator, which is now having 4.82 crore active customers across the country.
Now, GP will share information about the defaulted post-paid subscribers, who have already switched off their mobiles, with its appointed agent to trace out the defaulted subscribers.
The third-party will also be allowed to visit the customers physically, follow-up by phones, SMS and letter through E-mail.
If the agent either failed to collect any information of the subscribers’ details or detect them, it will try to find out the subscribers using information from the related FnF numbers and later on it will try to contact directly with the original subscribers, according to Grameenphone’s plan.
Meanwhile, BTRC has asked Grammenphone to ink a non-discloser agreement with the outsourcing company that it will not disclose any information of those defaulted subscribers.
“As the regulator has finally accepted our application, we will go for the next step shortly,” Mahmud Hossain, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer (CCAO) of Grameenphone told the Dhaka Tribune.
Besides Grameenphone, some other operators like Robi has also appointed such agents to realise their due bills.
Mahtab Uddin Ahmed, Chief Financial Officer of Robi has, however, denied to appoint any third-party for his company to collect the dues from its clients as saying, “As we don’t have huge amount outstanding bills like Grameenphone, we do not need to appoint any third party to collect negligible dues.”
“From 1997 till date Grameenphone has debt amount of Tk100 crore (approx) from about 575,000 debt accounts,” according to the application of Grameenphone, which had earlier sent to the BTRC for getting the permission.
“Grameenphone currently recovers post-paid bad debt using its internal resources. However, with the given resources the total customer-base could not be reached and thus a significant number of the customers remain untouched for collecting such debt while the numbers are piling up,” reads the application.
Meanwhile, GP has uploaded a Request for Proposal (RFP) for appointing the third party.
One the other hand, lots of subscribers have deposited thousands of taka as security money against their numbers although their connections have been remained suspended.
BTRC has already reportedly questioned Grameenphone to inform it about the whereabouts of such huge amount of money, which has long been remained with the operator as security money.
BTRC is soon going to issue a letter to all the operators asking them to inform it about the figure of the deposited security money and also to take necessary steps to refund the money back to the respective subscribers.
Source: Dhaka Tribune
