A: At Airtel, I play the role of a custodian of customer service in addition to the classic CIO role. Before we look at customer service, I would like to first throw an overview on how we look at our internal and external customers.

Customer service calls for the understanding of three critical questions. The first question that comes to my mind is who are these customers? The second question is what services are we offering them and finally how are these services been offered to them.

We have two large segments of customers that fall in the B2C and B2B category. In the B2C segment, we look at the consumer segment that comprises urban and rural areas. We provide our services in 5,000 cities in the country and 4,00,000 villages. The consumer segment also includes homes where we offer mobile and other services like broadband and television.

On the B2B front, we have large corporate customers as well as small and medium businesses (SMB). Now what we offer to these customers is four screens. These four screens are mobile, computer, television and silver screen. For the mobile screen, we offers a bouquet of communication, content and commercial services. For the computer, we offer broadband services, while on the television platform we have Direct to home (DTH) and IPTV. For the silver screen, we are now working on digital cinema distribution etc.

Besides the four screens, there is also four Cs: communication, content, commerce and computing. Communication is our base class of service that includes voice and SMS; content is what we offer on Airtel Live through mediums such as mobile, broadband and television portal. Commerce is brought in through mobile commerce, while computing is tendered through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other cloud-based services.

The process by which we serve these customers by employing the four screens and four Cs is what we call as the beach model where our customers are our ocean and our partners form the beach that touches all our customers. These partners include all of the frontline touch points that interact with our customers. These touch points include our retail showrooms, retailers, call centre agents, collection agencies etc.

We have a customer base of around 110 million, and there are 130 to 140 million people who support us as partners. The way we look at customer service is to ensure that there is a tight business engagement to accelerate customer happiness. In fact BEACH is an acronym for Business Engagement to Accelerate Customer Happiness.

This means that the beach house (company) has to work in sync with the beach (partners) so that the DNA of the brand from the beach house goes through the beach and is shared with the ocean (customers).

A: The ‘beach’ model has worked well as we built a business engagement model between our set of partners. This business engagement model was built from our learnings based out of our IT model. In the IT model, we built an outcome oriented model, where the IT costs were linked directly to revenues. This is nothing but percentage of revenue and within that percentage it includes capital expenditure, operating expenditure and end projects costs etc.

As an example, using this strategy we changed the model of our BPO partners by moving them away from effort orientation and focusing on outcome orientation. We have in place a measurement ratio that we call as the outcome to effort ratio.

Effort, for example, is simply picking up the phone and answering a call. Now has the call resolved the customer query and ensured customer satisfaction? Has it reduced churn and increased our overall satisfaction scores? Has it helped in cross sell and add value to the customer? So we now look at a host of such outcome parameters.

We have bought together technology to empower our customers. We have been doing multi-channel empowerment to solve their needs. Multi-channel implies using services like the Web, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), interactive SMS and Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD) where all of these are shared in a simple manner. These services are independent of the channel and are transmitted to back-end IT systems. So this is a true multi-channel interaction.

For example, our * 121# application answers all the queries of our customers. This has been a hit with majority of our customers, and since this service is USSD-based, it can run on any mobile device. This is also integrated real time into our backend CRM billing and provisioning systems. There is another service My Airtel My Offer (MAMO) that has a recommendation engine to look at previous usage trends and recommend best tariff plans that users can choose.

So customers can get access to any information from any channel they choose with the same customer experience. We have more than 100 million transactions a month on these combined channels.

Since customer service is closely knit with the CIO responsibility, we have realised that various platforms and processes need to efficiently converge in order to help the end customer.

A: Traditional CIO roles worldwide have evolved from the technical community of engineering, training etc. At the end of the day, a CIO is more of a consumer of technology than a creator of new technology. So when they consume technology, they need to do it keeping the business needs and processes in mind.

What has happened lately is that in the process of consuming technology, there is more time and effort spent on getting just that piece right. Therefore, every element that a CIO has to do from business process all the way to design and implementation, operations etc. is typically been done by the CIOs own shop.

Given the changes in the outsourcing scenario, CIOs can divide their responsibilities so that they focus more on the business while the outsourcing partner can focus on the technology aspect of the business. This will help release a lot of time of the CIO, and there would be a shift in mindset towards more business and customer orientation.

Also, CIOs go through various roles in their career till they reach the position of a CIO. If you were to do a CIO scan across the globe, you will find that most of them have reached the position through a unilateral path. Their career experience has only gone up the technology chain. As the next-generation CIOs get created, it is desirable that they actually go through other business experiences.

A: Understanding the customer is a dimension that does not require a lot of technology. I feel that technology is just an add-on to cater to the customer needs that provides value in a smart way.

rahul.mani@9dot9.in