Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading global telecommunications company with operations in 18 countries serving 471 million customers. Currently, the telco has a market share of 31.3% in India. It has over 358 million subscribers in 2021 and is the only telco in India to grow its subscriber base in January and February of 2022.
The telco organises itself into 5 business segments; Mobile services, Home services, Digital TV services, Airtel business and Tower infrastructure. Mobile services is the dominant revenue stream accounting for over 70 percent of the total.
Drive for CX
“Delivering a superior experience to our customers is the cornerstone of our strategy. We continue to invest in strengthening the foundational components of experience in the customer lifecycle – search, discover, purchase, onboard, experience and refer. As part of the customer’s search and discover journey, we are focused on omni-channel acquisition across all businesses to provide a truly differentiated and unified One Airtel experience.” – Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, India & South Asia
twimbit conducted a detailed study to identify the top 10 telcos in APAC to ace customer experience, benchmarking them across four pillars, viz., digital experience, service experience, employee experience and brand experience.
Airtel achieved the 6th overall score in this analysis across all telcos in Asia Pacific. A particular highlight for Aitel is focus on improving customer support with digital tools via its in-house data analyser application. Also, the operator utilises new-age technology to enhance its service and brand experience with a vision to bring these features to India, kickstarting the rolling out of 5G.
Key initiatives
In-house digital innovation factory
Airtel collects customer data by the trillions, from problems, trends, and behaviours to demand. Armed with this data, Airtel strategises business plans and executes initiatives within the company to provide the best customer experience. One such initiative is Airtel X Labs, a platform that processes trillions of data records across products & services to design and innovate customer solutions. Furthermore, the platform focuses on emerging technologies such as IoT, AI, Digital Engineering and Machine Learning emphasising on customer experience.
Partnering with leading ICT players to enhance network
To enhance their service and customer experience, Airtel has partnered with a multitude of companies to improve their network infrastructure. Furthermore, due to their recent 5G announcement, these partnerships enable the rapid roll-out of 5G networks and the ability to scale these services in India.
Digitizing the workforce to better support customers
Meshing digital technology with its customer experience and support has helped Airtel improve its customer experience. Furthermore, Airtel empowers its employees through digital tools to better serve customers. These include:
- Advanced AI ‘Decision Tree’ is used by customer service agents to reduce the time taken to resolve queries.
- Rolling out of the ‘Mitra’ application for digitised payment collection at retail stores
- Real-time tracking of on-site requests from ‘Airtel Work’ benefiting network field force
Campaign to address all customer queries
The telco is striving toward the utopian ideal of ‘ZERO Questions’ – a state of customer support that solves every challenge and ensures failures do not get repeated.
Driving this vision, Airtel launched an ‘Open to Questions’ campaign where consumers can post questions and comments, leaving the telco open to public scrutiny. The telco aims to use the data to produce customer insights, improve product functionality and add new features.
How you can match up with/to Airtel
From digital to employee experience, Airtel powers forth new-age technology in all their experiences. Furthermore, their drive to provide the utopian idea of resolving every failure and preventing repetition has genuinely proven their customer-centric ideology. They have innovated Airtel X Labs to analyse and provide actionable data to improve their customer support. The critical differentiators in Airtel’s approach include:
- Significant investment in omni-channel customer engagement
- Leverage ICT partnerships to enhance the network experience
- Enable employees with digital tools to better serve customers