CASE STUDY 2

Theme: Customer segmentation using CRM Analytics by Bharti Air-tel. Bharti seeks out the world's best technology and puts it at the service of its customers. CRM is part of this process. 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. Bharti Tele-Ventures is one of India's leading private sector telecom operators. Its cellular business, Air-Tel, is a leading mobile telephony brand. Like any telephone company, Bharti considers information technology a key business enabler. "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 company representative, vice president of Information Technology at Bharti. It had a WAN in place with a mix of leased lines and El and E3 lines. 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 the company. 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," the company representative adds. Bharti also has a storage area network (SAN) in place. The main data centre is located in Gurgaon, Haryana. 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. The case for CRM Initially, when Bharti started operations, the whole system was running manually.: "At that point of time only 40 per cent of our customer issues were getting resolved this has now gone up to about -90 per cent," reveals the company.

"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," company explains. To achieve this, Bharti needed the right tools. "It is this need that made the company opt for a CRM (customer relationship management) solution," the company representative feels. Cherrypicking a solution Today Bharti is using the Oracle CRM platform. "As part of our vision we intend to provide Air-Tel services anywhere and at anytime. A customer should get the same quality of service no matter which of our call centers h~ contacts. This has been our vision, and because of that we have gone in fo a centralized application like CRM," company adds. Before choosing its CRM tool, Bharti evaluated many options. I 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 After starting its services in Delhi, Bharti acquired many circles and sough new licenses in other circles; whenever they got a new license, they implementer 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," say; company executive. 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 yot go in for such a large-scale implementation you will definitely have problems,' says the company. We also had certain technical difficulties during implementation, but we were able to overcome them." The CRM strategy at Air-Tel revolves around two aspects: operational CR? and analytical CRM. The first is about helping their call centers in the workflow part,

helping them in their day-to-day activities. The second provides staff wits 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 The company spokesperson says it is important to understand and segregate customer needs depending on the product and services he is buying. "One o the primary things that we have done in this solution is the segmentation o. customers. With this, Air-Tel is now able to give its customers more value for money," the company feels. 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 CRM tool. Learning point The company was able to implement the tailor-made schemes with the help of CRM solution adopted by the company. The data is subjected to analysis with the help of analytic tools and came out with schemes which suited the individual user. This improves the marketing efforts of the company and the success rate of the marketer. Ultimately, both the company and the service user is benefited by the CRM implementation.

Q.1 How tailor made schemes with the help of CRM solution helped company. Q.2 What are the two building blocks & CRM of Bharti Airtel. and how they are useful to company. Q.3 Why for telecom industry IT is crucial tool explain.