Airtel builds quick response team

To make its operations future ready, Airtel is putting in place a team of software engineers and data scientists to develop solutions and services quickly to meet the changing consumer demands.

The telecom company, for example, developed a solution to monitor sites where frequent call drops were happening through its in-house team called Agile Laboratories. “Our coders at Agile Labs came up with a prototype solution within five days. It would have taken us six months to get the same application from an outside vendor,” Gopal Vittal, Managing Director and CEO, Airtel, told BusinessLine .

The engineers at the lab have developed a service app for its field officials enabling them to fast track customer resolutions by queuing each customer according to his proximity while being on the move.

“At the heart of our gameplan is how to get quality customers and how to retain them. To do that we have done a number of things aimed at enhancing consumer experience,” said Vittal.

Airtel has also hired data scientists to help mine the vast amount of user data and help design programmes that simplify existing processes. Airtel sales force, for instance, now has a mobile application that tells the members the churn rate (consumers exiting Airtel network) at the level of each retailer and what they need to do to plug the exit. Airtel has also taken on global experts to help with emerging areas such as business intelligence

All of this is being done because the telecom business has changed from offering plain vanilla voice to data services. Airtel itself has started music streaming services and mobile payment facility.

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