Bahrain’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) received a total of 401 complaints in 2015 of which 92 per cent (369) were managed, an improvement from 2014 where 409 complaints were received of which 75 per cent (301) were closed.

The categories of complaints, which were received by the end of 2015 varied, predominantly Billing and Invoicing complaints which made up 33.4 per cent, Quality of Service making up 20.4 per cent and Roaming complaints tallying up to 11.4 per cent of 401 received.

Other categories included contractual issues, fraud, Number Portability, service application, among others. It took an average amount of 18 days to close complaints in 2015, which is another significant improvement from 2014 where complaints took 35 days on average.

TRA acting director of Consumer Affairs & Media, Taiba Al Binali said: “We place a high importance on ensuring consumer issues are addressed in a timely and satisfactory manner, and a great way to accomplish that is by optimizing our internal processes. Consumers expect reliable experience when using their telecoms services, and we urge them to approach us should that not be the case and trust that we’re dedicated to helping them.”

TRA works closely with Silah, which manages the Authority’s call center. A report on 2015’s activities reveals that awareness of TRA has climbed from the previous year growing from 2,716   inbound calls in 2014 to 3,407 in 2015.

Among its performance indicators is the Service Level Agreement (SLA), where 80 per cent of calls are expected to be answered within 20 seconds, and while the results of SLA in 2014 were at 91.7 per cent, this was maintained in 2015 successfully at 93.3 per cent. Additionally, the average speed of which a call was answered was only 7 seconds compared to 8 in the previous year.

The contact center achieved an outstanding rate for First Contact Resolution (FCR) with more than 94.63 per cent. This rate highlights that most calls received by the TRA are handled by the TRA agents on spot.

The agents were able to identify the most common issues of the calls and resolve them at the same day and time. A percentage of 5.37 per cent of the calls were referred to TRA for processing as they required further investigation or access to the complaint system. – TradeArabia News Service