Summary

  • TRAI's 2 November amendment requires telecom complaint centres to operate around the clock, while guaranteeing human help for at least sixteen hours each day. An AI agent must identify itself and work under human oversight.
  • It halves the post-disposal appeal filing window to fifteen days, orders a decision and action within fifteen days of receipt, and requires quarterly publication of complaint and appeal results. Commencement runs in stages from Gazette publication.

At three in the morning, “open” can mean a person or a menu that never gets tired. TRAI's Fourth Amendment regulation allows both, but draws a line: complaint centres must answer every hour, and a human representative must be available for at least sixteen hours daily, seven days a week. An AI agent must tell the caller what it is. If the automated path cannot finish the job, the rule requires a route to a human and a callback option for a queue. The front door is always open; the staffing guarantee has a closing time.

That difference matters because the consumer's clock is getting shorter. The amendment cuts the time to appeal a disposed complaint from thirty days to fifteen. The provider's appellate authority, made up of management employees with at least five years' experience, must decide and take action within fifteen days of receiving the appeal. The provider must communicate the result within three days after disposal. An app, web portal, email, post, an in-person visit or the care number can carry the appeal. The rule thus makes the path easier to enter while giving a dissatisfied customer half as long to choose it.

TRAI also gives the complaint a public afterlife. The provider must ask for a five-point satisfaction rating after closure, then report the number of responses, the mean and the count at each rating. Its quarterly performance report must separate complaints and appeals by service area and show received, disposed, pending, late and average-resolution figures. The report goes to TRAI and on the provider's website, portal and app within fifteen days of quarter end. Management sees a quarterly report; a committee with registered consumer-organisation representatives meets at least annually.

TRAI can inspect records and apply specified financial disincentives.

The TRAI release presents these as new protections. The signed regulation is more precise about timing: most provisions start thirty days after publication in the Official Gazette, some after sixty, and the round-the-clock/AI disclosure and digital-route provisions after ninety. The available TRAI file says it is to be published in the Gazette; the publication date is the specific fact needed to date those clocks.

The first useful scorecard will pair a closed-ticket count with the dissatisfied ratings and appeals that followed it. A complaint centre can answer every hour and still make the difficult hour the one when no person is there.