BSNL On-line bill payment - Irritating but works. Review on BSNL Broadband

I could not find an approprite category for my review. This ia a review about BSNL online payment web portal.

I have been using the BSNL web site for paying my land-line phone bills on-line since July-2009. The URL is: https://portal.bsnl.in/portal/aspxfiles/login.aspx.

You have to first register your landline phone number, giving all relevant information including an e-mail address and a cell phone number.

You then obtain User id and password through e-mail. After that every month when the bill is released you can go on line and clicking on the View / Pay outstanding bill s link see your outstanding bill or initiate payment. There is provision to pay through credit card, debit card or Internet banking. First check if your city is included in the list of cities that are enabled for on-line payment.

I use my ICICI credit card to pay my bills. Even though the site has a few quirks, I have till date not faced the problem of my phone being disconnected. However, it is a fact that on most occasions I am unsure if my payment has been accepted or not, from the information made available on BSNL web site.

The on-line bill payment sequence is as follows:

Choose credit card, internet banking or debit card from the radio button list and in my case I choose Credit Card(CC) and it takes me to the credt card information entry screen where you have to give your name, CC number, expiry date and CRV number.

After you enter this information you are redirected to the 3D secure password site(ICICI - Visa in my case) and after you complete the formalities you are again redirect back to BSNL site. This is when things go wrong. If all is well you get a print receipt button screen and clicking on that will display the receipt in adobe format. If you are through then you can be sure yr payment is a success. Now one cannot be sure of this, as mostly it takes a very long time and the site gives a session timeout error, after which you are forced to log in again.

In such a case check the ‘View Payment transactions” link to know what went wrong or if something went right. The payment transaction table contains fields like telephone no, bill no, bill amount and payment status. If one is unable to get through the payment process, either due to portal problem or connectivity issues, the status field shows a ‘FAILED’ remark.

Most of the time you get an INITIATED remark, which in a day or 2 gets changed to SUCCESS. If this happens then you can rest assured that you are through. But most of the time this does not happen and you continue to see ‘INITIATED’ message for days on end making you wonder if BSNL has received your payment or not. With the pay-by-date approaching fast you are in a dilemma whether to initiate on-line payment again or to go pay the bill by hand at their customer care counter.

Fortunately ICIC bank sends an SMS message with Amount, recipient name and date, every time a BSNL bill payment is successful.

This month(jan-2010) I had a peculiar problem. Even though the bill was released on the 7th day of the month, the on-line payment page showed I had no outstanding bills. I had to keep checking almost every day till the 25th and I finally saw I had an outstanding bill. You cannot pay on-line until there is an outstanding bill page displayed. I could have bought myself some peace of mind had I paid my bill by hand.

After going through the payment modalities I listed above I finally got an INITIATED remark in the view transactions page and it still shows my payment is pending. But I got an SMS from ICIC bank confirming payment. I am just keeping my fingers crossed. This has happened to me previously too so I hope its going to be okay. It is irritating but one just has to have a lot of patience when you deal with BSNL

One more thing, there is no contact or feedback form on BSNL website where you can tell someone about such problems. They seem to have a customer care portal (https://portal.bsnl.in/bsnlcca/login.aspx) where you can register your complaints. It is very lengthy procedure and I doubt if it works.