Airtel has changed its game to be ready for digital play, says Gopal Vittal

When Gopal Vittal took over as the CEO of Airtel in 2013, the biggest challenge was to bring the company back to the growth path. With voice telephony tariffs hitting rock bottom, the company’s profits were declining quarter after quarter. In addition, he had to invest enough to make Airtel ready for the new phase of digital economy.

Vittal embarked on a five-pronged strategy, at the heart of which was putting consumers at centre stage. He initiated a slew of initiatives, including simplified tariffs, doing away with complex processes that dealt with consumer complaints and incentivising the sales force for getting and retaining quality customers. All these seem to have worked for Airtel, now the third-largest mobile operator in the world. BusinessLine spoke with Vittal to know the details of the strategy and the challenges ahead. Edited excerpts of the interview:

You have been at the helm of Airtel for over two years. What are the big changes you have done in this period?

The mobile market has changed fundamentally in the last few years. From a period of explosive voice growth in the past, we have seen slowdown there. At the same time, we are now seeing explosive data growth. And simultaneously there are many smaller businesses like Mobile Commerce, which are at a nascent start-up stage. So, the key challenge for us as a company is to play multiple games in the context of a changed market. Our focus, therefore, has been to play different games simultaneously. And this is only possible if we put the customer at the heart of all we do. That is what we are attempting to do.

But customer complaints seem to be on the rise with things like call drops and faulty billing. How are you dealing with this?

We take every customer complaint very seriously. In fact, I personally receive 300-400 complaints every month which I painstakingly read since it gives me a very good sense of key issues.

In the last two years Raghu, who heads our Customer Experience, has done a marvellous job in identifying patterns and root causes of every issue. As a part of that, he and his team have identified 17 moments of truth – for example, a customer wanting to shift from pre-paid to post-paid is a moment of truth. Or, when someone wants to change their address, or they pay a bill but don’t get a proper acknowledgement.

Each of these is being meticulously fixed through a declaration of war on failure. The fact is that as we have grown, our IT systems have got complex, our processes have got more complex.

We have had to ruthlessly problem-solve and simplify these processes. By doing this, customers are calling us less, costs have fallen and we have improved the experience.

A second area is to put our whole focus on winning with valuable customers. We have done several things to achieve that. For example, our marketing team led by Srini reinvented our post-paid business by offering a single tariff plan called - My Plan - where customers can chose their plan. From 6,500 tariff plans, we moved to one plan.

On the retail side, we have rolled out 400 of our own stores and we have spent an incredible amount of time on training. Our store staff don’t have a sales target. Their only target is to serve customers.

In our book, it is a crime to ask them what they sold. Instead, if you ask them -- how did they please the customer -- sales follow. This is what we call ‘Serve to Sell’. On call drops, we are facing serious issues in terms of congested networks due to limited spectrum. The only way to deal with this is to put up more sites. However, we struggle to get permissions to put up sites due to misplaced fears of the impact of air waves.

What changes have you initiated in your distribution network to ready them for new challenges?

We have changed our game to get the right quality of customers and when we get these customers we want to keep them. We have 13 circle CEOs, all of whom work with Ajai, our Director for market operations.

In the last two years, Ajai and his team have developed the science to know exactly what is happening in terms of the quality of customers we acquire at every one of the 1.5 million retailers we cover. We now monitor our churn at the retailer level.

Every one in the sales team carries a target that is aligned to this goal.

And we have developed a simple mobile application that delivers this information at the point of sale. As a consequence our churn is at an industry low.

How are you dealing with rising rural demand?

Over the last eight to nine months, we have gone deeper and direct into the rural market. Earlier, we had multiple layers with distributors and sub-distributors. Today, we only have the distributor and retailer. The company is able to go directly into most rural markets. We also have promotions for demand generation. For example, we have mobile vans across country that educate people on how to use the internet.

How worried are you about OTT players?

It’s not a worry at all. Over-the-top (OTT) services are the reason for the existence of our data business. Afterall, customers don’t use data. Instead they use Facebook or listen to music or watch a video and that is what OTT does for us. Innovate to grow our mobile internet business. This is why we embrace innovation in the OTT world and work very closely with that ecosystem.

Our only submission has been that everyone must be subject to same rules. We are subject to a whole bunch of rules like spectrum charges, and USO fund contribution. For those companies offering voice services, we believe that the same rules must apply.

So, the issue is only about voice apps?

Yes. It is about voice. Otherwise, whether it is Saavn or Gaana or YouTube, we still earn data revenue. We are neutral.

What is the status of Airtel Zero?

Airtel Zero is an open platform and we have signed up 130-140 partners, but we have not activated yet till the issues around it are resolved.

Has the controversy around Airtel Zero impacted your brand image?

There have been comments on social media much of which was based on an incomplete picture. That said, we are always very sensitive to views of every customer. Some of the negative comments were, therefore, a source of concern.

However, if you look at the bigger picture, we have to keep asking ourselves – are we serving customers well – are we keeping them for longer on our network?

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