TATA DOCOMO launches 'diet-sms'

NEW DELHI, INDIA: TATA DOCOMO, the GSM brand of Tata Teleservices Ltd, India’s fastest-growing pan-India dual-technology telecom service provider, has announced another innovative offer in the country, diet-sms, with customers being given the never-before option of paying for any SMS they send on a per-character pricing plan.

The cost of any ‘diet-sms’ will be only 1 paise per character used, thereby providing complete value to customers. Furthermore, there will be no charge for spaces between words, living up to TATA DOCOMO’s promise of not charging subscribers for the ‘unused’.

TATA DOCOMO has launched services in eight telecom circles in just two months, and the countrywide rollout of its GSM services is expected to be completed by this year.

“In all of the eight Circles where we have launched our GSM services, we made the promise of introducing path-breaking innovative products and services, and never-before tariff options. The diet-sms service is another way of fulfilling that promise,” Deepak Gulati, President, TATA DOCOMO, said.

“Today’s customer is discerning and seeks transparency, innovation and differentiation. Our products and services are tailored to uphold the trust associated with the House of Tata—and TATA DOCOMO follows the concept of fare being fair. From today, all TATA DOCOMO subscribers will be able to enjoy the benefits of pay-as-you-use even in SMS,” he added.

The unique part of the offer is that any customer can choose the diet-sms option when he/she has short text messages to send—he/she can continue to use the regular SMS option for longer SMS. “Our diet-sms concept is a result of thought leadership, creativity and innovation, riding on TATA DOCOMO’s customer-centric approach to doing business,” Mr Gurinder Singh Sandhu, Head of Marketing at TATA DOCOMO said.

“We broke the per-minute pricing paradigm for voice calls when we launched our services—with diet-sms, we are doing it again, this time on the SMS front. At TATA DOCOMO, we believe in taking the best that technology has to offer to make life more refreshing for our customers,” Gulati said.

To send a diet-sms, a customer has to:
* Go to the SIM-based menu on the phone (called Dive-in Now), scroll to the diet-sms option under the English Language menu, open it and send the SMS; or

* TATA DOCOMO has also launched a phone application which can be downloaded from TATA DOCOMO ‘Dive In’ WAP portal, or by simply sending a SMS “diet” to 54321. * Using this diet-sms application, the customer can send short text messages easily; or
* TATA DOCOMO customers can also send a diet-sms using the normal SMS menu. They need to type the mobile number followed by a space followed by the message and sms this to the short code 52208.

The downloaded diet-sms application also contains a bank of most common short SMS as templates. Customers can select from any of these templates and send the message by simply clicking ‘Send’.

“The diet-sms service is revolutionary and tailor-made to suit Indian customers—a survey conducted by TATA DOCOMO found out that a majority of SMS sent in India are very short—we designed this application after studying trends such as this, in order to benefit the customer,” Gulati said.

The diet-sms service is available to customers on the per-character pricing plan on the TATA DOCOMO network only.