12/1/2010 CRM responsible for magic at Bharti - C…

Issue dated -11th October 2004

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CURRENT ISSUE
KEANE INSIGHT - BFSI Telecom
CASE STUDIES
TEC H SPAC E CRM responsible for magic at Bharti
COLUMNS
TEC H FOR UM Bharti seeks out the world's best technology and puts it at the service of its
THE C # C O LUMN customers. CRM is part of this process
BETW EEN THE BYTES
TEC HNOLO GY Bharti Tele-Ventures is one of India's leading private
O ne of the prim ary
things that Bharti has
sector telecom operators. Its cellular business,
SPECIALS <NEW> done with CR M is
AirTel, is a leading mobile telephony brand. Like any
se gm e ntation of
Symantec Report
telco, Bharti considers information technology a key
custom e rs, which has
Security he lpe d in providing
business enabler. "For telecom, IT is like bread and
Headquarters custom e rs m ore
butter. We believe it plays two significant roles-it
value for the ir
JobsDB works as a support system, and it can also be a
m one y, says Am rita
MINDPRINTS Gangotra business driver. Thus IT is very important to us,"
HMA BANKBIZ says Amrita Gangotra, vice president of Information Technology at Bharti. It had a
EC SERVICES WAN in place with a mix of leased lines and E1 and E3 lines. The company also has an
A RCHIVES/SEA RCH extranet in place through which it extends different applications to its dealers and
IT A PPOINTMENTS partners. "We have an extremely large infrastructure based on products from multiple
Openings A t vendors," says Gangotra. This includes a range of high-end servers from Sun and HP.
Jobstreet.com "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.
WR ITE TO US Bharti also has a storage area network (SAN) in place. The main data centre is located
SUBSC RIBE/R ENEW in Gurgaon, Haryana. As far as software is concerned, some of the applications that
CUSTO MER SERVIC E are running on its network are billing, fraud management, revenue assurance and data
ADVER TISE warehousing. They also have some internal-facing applications like Oracle Financial and
ABO UT US Oracle HRMS.

Network Sites
The case for CRM
IT Pe ople
Initially, when Bharti started operations, the whole system was run manually. "At that
Network Magazine
Busine ss Trave lle r
point of time only 40 percent of our customer issues were getting resolved-this has
Exp. Hotelie r & Cate re r
now gone up to about 90 percent," reveals Gangotra.
Exp. Trave l & Tourism "It is vital for us to manage the expectations of our customers and provide them with
Exp. Pharm a Pulse innovative products and services in a manner which makes them loyal," explains
Exp. He althcare Mgm t. Gangotra. To achieve this, Bharti needed the right tools. "It is this need that made us
Expre ss Te x tile opt for a CRM (customer relationship management) solution," she says.
Group Sites
Expre ssIndia Cherrypicking a solution
Indian Expre ss
Financial Ex pre ss 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.
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 exercise, it decided to go ahead with the
Oracle CRM platform.

Roll it

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 12/1/2010 CRM responsible for magic at Bharti - C…
After starting its services in Delhi, Bharti acquired many 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. The goal was that all the circles
would 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.

Tailor-made schemes

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.

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