Not every idea that a CIO comes up with has to be a technology intensive and complex in implementation, to be called an innovation and perhaps more importantly also help boost revenues. Ajay Satyarthi, Senior general manager - IT at Videocon Telecommunications ltd. (VTl), part of telecommunication division of $4 billion Videocon group, showed this, when he tweaked some existing, proven architectures to achieve superior results.

VTL is licensed to offer pan-India gsm mobile services across the nation, covering 22 circles (regions as geographically designated by the nation's tele-communications regulator).

In the hyper-competitive mobile phone services market in India, new entrants, such as Videocon have to find innovative ways to attract and retain customers. Technology will play a major role across the operations from making it very easy for customers to get the information that they need, to monitoring and tracking trends to react quickly to opportunities.

As a more recent entrant into the market, VTl chose to outsource many of its requirements to get its show off the ground quickly. in the mobile phone business, the customer contact centre is central to ensuring both customer care and value added service are delivered well.

Single IVR Platform
“Nowhere in the country is a wireless services provider using a common IVR with both the customer care calls and the value added services calls running on the same platform,” Satyarthi says. This is something unique, he says.

The advantage is “on one side, we are actually catering for the call centre, which is a cost centre for us, while on the other, a revenue generating application is running on the same platform.”

“Other operators have either the one or the other, but not the both sets of calls running on the same technology and on the same platform” he says.

Dynamic Allocation
“What happens is that we build a common IVR platform and instead of terming it a contact centre IVR or VAS IVR, we call it a unified IVR platform,” Satyarthi explained. At the heart of this model is the dynamic allocation of ports to both the applications: What this means is that if for instance the contact centre is receiving a lot of calls at a particular time and  the VAS is relatively free, the ports of the VAS IVR will get dynamically allocated to the contact centre application and vice versa.

Similarly, the VAS IVR will pick up ports from the customer contact centre side and therefore generate more revenue.

This not only ensures that congestions are eased on both applications, ensuring customers' calls aren't dropped, but also improves the contact centre's revenue-generating capability by dynamically boosting the call-handling capacity at the VAS IVR end. With few or no calls dropped, customer satisfaction is high as well.

On the VAS IVR too, all the services are run on the same single IVR platform. In the traditional set up, each VAS, be it music on demand, caller back ring tone or a voice portal or a full-track song, each service would have its own IVR – that's the standard process.

“What we've done is to build a common IVR to capture caller’s choice no matter which VAS a customer is interested in,” Satyarthi said. This is simply done by prompting the customer to select a choice by pressing a number, which would then route the caller to that particular service

Eliminating Problems
As of today this hasn't been done elsewhere. Operators are struggling to do a consolidation migration to these kinds of platforms, Satyarthi says. When Satyarthi was building the architecture for the VAS and the contact centre, having joined VTL from an incumbent competitor, he decided to pick up all the existing problems faced by various operators and ensured that his architecture eliminated all of them.

For instance, there was a problem of publishing multiple numbers for multiple VAS. At the operator's end, reconciliation and management of the IVRs, their port capacities and other operational issues – he decided to identify all the problems and resolve them first.

At one point, it was difficult to convince the VAS providers that they can work on standards based platforms

“Today, neither my music-on-demand nor my CRBT VAS provider has its own IVR,” Satyarthi said. “They use our platform and we've exposed VXML 2.0 and 2.1 APIs to these partners, so they just bring in their application.

They connect to the centralized IVR platform, the responsibility of rating, charging, reconciliation lies with VTl instead of them as was the case in a traditional setup..

Better Deals
Obviously this means that we've got better revenue sharing model from the VAS partners. In the conventional system, they would have had to invest in the software and the hardware for the IVR to provide VAS, which they have avoided with VTl, Satyarthi said.

The unified platform also meant that Satyarthi was able to negotiate more attractive contracts with his system integrator Wipro and the technology provider Avaya, he said.

“We have played on the volumes, by consolidating the calls of both the VAS and the contact centre.” in a traditional setup, about 60 percent of the calls are from the customer care end of the platform while the rest are usually from the VAS side.

So in the conventional set up, one would have negotiated for the volumes – in terms of minutes handled by the contact centre outsourced service provider – of the customer care calls separately and the VAS volumes separately.

What VTL did was to negotiate rates based on the combined volumes, reducing its costs of handling all the calls.

Set to exceed Targets
VTL set itself an initial set of targets that included getting 25 million customers in the first phase of implementations. The rate at which the mobile phone services provider is adding customers today, “we will probably far exceed that,” Satyarthi said.

He wanted a cost optimized solution and knew what the problems were and what the available solutions were. VTl initially started with a centralized model with the option of decentralization if needed. Today they run out of one data centre in Chennai, with a clear idea of what volumes the existing model can handle and at what point they will have to start decentralization.

The initial target was that the IT must support VTL's business and yet have a cost model that was sustainable over the next 10 years.

“The way we've done our contracts with our partners, we're managing them on SLAs and KPIs,” Satyarthi said. “There is an agreement with the Sis that says the system has to be available for a certain percent of the time and reliability has to ensure for a certain percent of the time”, he said.

With mobile number portability being implemented in India, “our systems were MNP compliant from the word go,” he said. “We don't work on number series or circle specific numbers. Today it is intra-circle and tomorrow it will be inter-circle. We will be faster in these areas, as our systems were architected in such a way,” he said.

While VTL didn’t participate in the 3g spectrum auctions, the company’s iT enterprise is geared up to support multiple options to expand vertically as well as horizontally in the coming months and years, he said.

By Harichandan Arakali