Operators should take a long-term view, put the standardization of services in the first place, and be truly responsible for consumers.
According to a CCTV report, Mr. Yao from Heilongjiang reported that when he inquired about the phone bill in November 2023, he found that from September 2023, a value-added service fee of 9.9 yuan would be deducted every month, and the customer service staff said that he had handled the CRBT business. However, he had never done this business at all, and the customer service later obtained the recording to confirm that Mr. Yao did not have a record of agreeing to handle this business.
Judging from the reports, this is not an isolated case. According to the staff of the Black Cat complaint platform, according to the statistics of the platform, from January 1, 2022 to March 5, 2024, searching for keywords such as "private deduction" and "unknowing deduction", there were 870 complaints from a certain operator alone.
The phenomenon of users being deducted without their knowledge, opening value-added services, and changing packages is actually an old problem. As early as 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) clearly required basic telecom companies to actively push communication bill information to users on a monthly basis by SMS in response to problems such as unknown deduction of mobile phone fees reported by the society, and strengthen governance at the source.
But to this day, this phenomenon is still somewhat widespread. When retrieving this kind of chaos, it is easy to find a feature, that is, these phenomena of private deduction without the permission of users are often related to third-party service providers. As shown in this media survey, many of the private deductions found by users are handled in other places, and the "outsourcing company" behind them is the operator.
Objectively speaking, it is understandable that operators outsource some business, reduce operating costs, and increase marketing channels. However, this approach also clearly magnifies the risk of service anomie.
On the one hand, outsourcing service companies are unevenly regulated, and they generally have a stronger impulse to pursue profits. On the other hand, some non-standard or marginal services and marketing, such as telemarketing suspected of harassment, are carried out by outsourcing companies, which to a certain extent weakens the direct responsibility of operators and helps them avoid regulatory red lines.
Obviously, in this process, although some irregular deductions are done through the outsourcing company, the operator actually has an unshirkable responsibility. Taking the service agreement between the user and the operator, if the user's rights and interests are infringed, the operator should be the one who is responsible for the infringement of the user's rights and interests, rather than the outsourcing company. Therefore, this kind of phenomenon seems to be the willful behavior of outsourcing companies, but in fact it is related to the management model and business philosophy of operators.
At present, the telecom market has entered the stock stage, and the competition among major operators is more intense. However, all kinds of "black-box operations" based on the infringement of consumer rights and interests are not only suspected of fraud and violating relevant laws, but also destined to have a great negative impact on user loyalty and even the social image of enterprises. On this issue, operators should establish a long-term vision, put the standardization of services in the first place, and be truly responsible for consumers.
Specifically, for operators, in addition to regulating the business behavior of outsourcing companies, it is also necessary to impose stricter restrictions on the scope of outsourcing services. For the regulatory authorities, the punishment of operators should be further strengthened to increase the cost of violating the rules for the behavior of opening charging items for users without permission.
In any case, the chaos of users being privately opened packages, value-added services, etc., has been going on for many years, and it is time to completely eradicate it. In this regard, it is advisable to start by regulating telecommunications outsourcing services.
Source: Beijing News Author: Chongzhou