CRM responsible for magic at Bharti

Though it is continuously spreading its wings, expanding its capabilities, and exploring new horizons, one rule at Bharti remains unchanged: seek out the world’s best technology and put it at the service of customers. CRM is part of this process, says Gaurav Patra

One of the primary things that Bharti has done with CRM is segmentation of customers, which has helped in providing customers more value for their money, says Amrita Gangotra

Bharti Tele-Ventures was incorporated on July 7, 1995 for promoting investments in telecommunication services. The company is now one of India’s leading private sector telecom operators with a customer base of 5.38 million—4.86 million mobile and 0.52 fixed line users, as on October 31, 2003.

The vision for its cellular business, AirTel, is to make mobile communication a way of life—and then become the customer’s first choice. The mission is to meet the mobile communication needs of the customer through error-free service, innovative products and services, and cost efficiency. The strategic objective is to consolidate its leadership position among mobile service providers in India. Through its subsidiaries, Bharti has licences to provide GSM services in 15 of the 22 telecom circles in the country. It now proposes to consolidate all these subsidiaries under Bharti Cellular.

Network infrastructure

Like any other telecom service provider, Bharti also considers information technology a key driver of its business. “For telecom, IT is like bread and butter. We believe it plays two significant roles—it works as a support system, and it can also be a business driver. Thus IT is very important to us,” says Amrita Gangotra, vice president of Information Technology at Bharti.

The service provider has a WAN set-up in place; it has a mix of leased lines and E1 and E3 lines for wide area connectivity. The company also has an extranet in place through which it extends different applications to its dealers and partners. “We have an extremely large infrastructure based on products from multiple vendors,” says Gangotra. This includes a range of high-end servers from Sun and HP. “In the telecom business volumes are very large. We have millions of records and we process them everyday, so for us storage is in terabytes,” she adds.

Bharti also has a storage area network (SAN) in place, and has selected EMC as the storage provider for the SAN. The main data centre is located in Gurgaon, Haryana. The company uses high-end routers from Cisco, and is in the process of implementing a disaster recovery (DR) set-up. As far as software is concerned, some of the applications that are running on its network are billing, fraud management, revenue assurance and data warehousing. They also have some internal-facing applications like Oracle Financial and Oracle HRMS.

Why CRM?

In a telecom services company like Bharti, airtime is considered a product. “It is vital for us to manage the expectations of our customers and provide them with innovative products and services in a manner which makes them loyal,” explains Gangotra. To achieve this, Bharti needed to have the appropriate means. “To better serve our customers we needed a tool. It is this need that made us opt for a CRM (customer relationship management) solution,” she says. Today Bharti is using the Oracle CRM platform. “As part of our vision, we intend to provide AirTel services anywhere and at any time. A customer should get the same quality of service no matter which of our call centres he contacts. This has been our vision, and because of that we have gone in for a centralised application like CRM,” Gangotra adds. The implementation of CRM also helped Bharti in having a unified workflow and unified processes across the country.

Before choosing its CRM tool, Bharti evaluated many options. It considered factors like proper workflow automation, facilitation of knowledge sharing, and integration with the billing system. After a thorough evaluation, it decided to go ahead with the Oracle CRM platform.

Benefits

Gangotra says it is important to understand and segregate customer needs depending on the product and services he is buying. “One of the primary things that we have done in this solution is the segmentation of customers. With this, AirTel is now able to give its customers more value for money,” she says. With the help of CRM, they are able to provide customers different schemes and services depending on airtime usage. If the customer is a heavy user then they have some specific schemes; for normal users they have other schemes. Apart from this, they have also managed to segregate their workflow with the help of the CRM tool.

Initially, when Bharti started operations, the whole system was run manually. “At that point of time only 40 percent of our customer issues were getting resolved—this has now gone up to about 90 percent,” reveals Gangotra.

Strategy has also played a major role in improving customer service at AirTel. After starting its services in Delhi, Bharti acquired lot of circles and sought new licences in other circles; whenever they got a new licence, they implemented the CRM tool immediately. But they had to put in a migration strategy in those acquired circles which had an existing subscriber base. “The migration had to be done in such a manner that the existing customer base did not suffer; we have already completed this in 14 of the 15 circles that we operate in,” says Gangotra. All the circles will go live by the first quarter of 2004.

The biggest challenge for Bharti was to have a unified process in place. Once this was done they faced the challenge of imparting training. “When you go in for such a large-scale implementation you will definitely have problems,” says Gangotra. “We also had certain technical difficulties during implementation, but we were able to overcome them.”

The CRM strategy at Airtel revolves around two aspects: operational CRM and analytical CRM. The first is about helping their call centres in the workflow part, helping them in their day-to-day activities. The second provides staff with the required information on customers; this is used for business development activities. Together they help Bharti provide better services to its customers.

gaurav@expresscomputeronline.com