Ok, the last part of the title might have been a cheap shot but I thought it was necessary for my thoughts later in the post.
On to the matters of more importance now. Bharti Airtel has chosen to implement a new customer experience management (CEM) platform provided by Nokia Siemens Networks. With the new solution, Bharti Airtel expects to enhance the customer experience across multiple touch points and also provide the company with real-time insights into customer usage patterns.
The management speak sure seems to suggest that the solution is exactly what Airtel needs to keep its customers happy in the wake of company’s massive expansion, challenges in the Indian Telecom sector and not to forget the company’s notorious distinction of being the leading operator in consumer complaints. Here is the statement from director of network group at Network Group,
The implementation of CEM is an added impetus to our constant endeavor of offering best in class service experience to our customers across GSM, EDGE and 3G networks. It will enable us to identify the root cause of a problem and rectify the same before the subscriber experiences any impairment in service delivery
I dug around a little into the CEM solution offering and the “real-time” and “proactive” approach that the solution promises could indeed be beneficial for mobile operators.
For example, NSN proposes that its CES solution can automatically flag and correct data access configuration settings for a subscriber in the event of subscriber failing to access data on his mobile. Now, wouldn’t that be great for a subscriber.
More than that, it will be great for Bharti Airtel because automated fault detection & remediation could free the company’s resources to focus on more strategic issues. After that, that has been the proverbial use case for outsourcing network operations et all to third-party providers till now.
Technology Is Not Always The Answer
With real-time systems also comes the power of getting a peak into subscriber usage patterns and Bharti Airtel is expected to use these insights to create better experiences for customers.
However, given the current state of affairs, I guess subscribers will be more than happy to get uninterrupted access to traditional voice & data services and if possible- workable solutions from customer care executives.
This brings me to introducing twitter complaints in the title of the post. All said and done, I wonder what is stopping Bharti Airtel to implement a decent Social CRM solution (please let me know if they already do).
More and more people are ranting about their frustrations about their mobile operators (Airtel is the not the only one) on twitter only to be slapped with template messages such as ‘Please DM us your number’ etc.
May be the operators have outsourced their social media to agencies but having a CRM system with interface to social networks atleast presents an opportunity to capture the customer complaint in the right fashion. So while, Bharti Airtel can implement n-number of technology solutions, it will have to take a more “hands-on” approach towards delighting the customer.
It will be another story if the new CEM solution is so robust and fail proof that customers will not have any reasons to complaint and voice their frustration on twitter or elsewhere but then who are we kidding here…
Do you think adding a customer experience management solution to its arsenal will help Bharti Airtel make the customer experience better leave side delighting the customer?
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