The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued fresh guidelines to service providers for providing value added services (VAS) to customers.
The guidelines have been framed in response to consumer complaints against operators for activating VAS without the customer?s consent.
TRAI has directed operators to obtain a confirmation from consumers at least twice before activating VAS and complete de-activation requests in four hours. As per the regulatory authority, service providers can consider the customer?s first consent for VAS on their platform but for the second consent, a dedicated gateway, which is owned by a third party, has to be established. It is only after receiving a second confirmation from the customer that the operator will activate the VAS.
According to TRAI, the procedure to activate VAS will include outbound dialling, SMS, mobile internet, interactive voice response system, tele-calling, unstructured supplementary services data (USSD) etc.
TRAI has also mandated that the de-activation requests should be completed in four hours. The deactivation procedure should be publicised through advertisements in newspapers, updation on the website and SMS.
Further, consumers can register complaints about wrongful activation of VAS on a toll-free common number, 155223. In case of wrong activation, the amount shall be refunded within 24 hours of the request made by the customer. Such customer requests should be within 24 hours for VAS with the validity of more than one day and within six hours for VAS with the validity of one day. The guidelines also state that customers should be informed through SMS and OBD 24 hours in advance prior to automatic renewal of VAS. Moreover, in case of USSD and SMS mode of activation, no activation response time should be more than 10 seconds and 60 minutes respectively and in case of non-response, the same should be treated as ?no activation required.
According to TRAI, upon activation of VAS, consumer should be clearly informed about the de-activation number, the validity of the VAS and charges for renewal.
