The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a slowdown and has reduced the spending capability of many people. During these hard times, people have started doing cost cuttings and rationalization.
According to a report by Economic Times, DTH platform Tata Sky is taking a unique step to prevent its subscribers from deactivating their DTH connection so that the money flow of the company doesn’t get affected badly.
Tata Sky is said to be planning to cancel subscriptions for some channels or packs for customers having monthly billing of Rs 350 or less. With this decision, the operator thinks that people will keep their DTH connections active as their monthly charges will be reduced.
The latest move is based on data from the company’s analytics team. Tata Sky says that it lost over 15 Lakh customers in the past two months after they either cancelled or failed to recharge, calling it unaffordable.
Apart from that, almost 70% of 50 Lakh subscribers who logged in to the Tata Sky website or app in May wanted to drop channels in order to reduce their monthly bills. Most of the customers who downgraded their plans had a monthly charge of less than Rs 400.
Harit Nagpal, Managing Director of Tata Sky, quoted saying to ET, “The analytics showed which customers were vulnerable and finding it difficult to pay. So, rather than losing customers entirely, we decided to drop some packs and channels and reduce their monthly bills. So, for the first time, we will use analytics to downgrade and not up-sell packs.”
Tata Sky has identified 60-70 Lakh of its 1.8 Crore subscribers whose monthly charges will reduce by Rs 60-100 due to this decision. The company will send notice to subscribers 15 days prior to cancelling their packs/channels, those who want to retain the channels have to make a missed call.
“If I am able to control churn, broadcasters still earn, but if the customer leaves, there is no revenue to share. I think it is time to rationalise the packs and retain the consumer. When things go back to normal, we expect customers to start adding channels and we, too, will go back to promoting upgrades,” Nagpal added.
It is not clear yet that on what basis or criteria Tata Sky will drop the channels or if they will simply downgrade users to any lower-cost curated pack.
