Bharti Airtel reduces customer onboarding time to minutes and maximizes QoS
People get irritated when they have to run a gauntlet of paperwork before they can start enjoying their new mobile device or service. Operators get irritated, too, because all that paperwork takes time to process, and time is money. Just ask Bharti Airtel Limited, which onboards 270,000 new customers every day. That paperwork is compounded by the 40 different types of proof of identity and proof of address (PoI/PoA) the operator and its resellers accept. To streamline its onboarding process, Bharti Airtel turned to TM Forum’s Open Digital Framework. The framework features hundreds of standardized business metrics for benchmarking, best practices and a host of interfaces and Open APIs that enable integration across systems and platforms.
At Airtel, immediate benefits included:
The new digital customer acquisition solution also complements Airtel’s next-generation network operation center (NOC) by providing additional insights into the customer experience.
India is the world’s second largest mobile market, with over 1 billion customers. At the end of 2018, more than 403 million of them were Airtel customers. Airtel’s digital on-boarding process supports 18 customer journeys, which vary by line of business, customer segment, type of offering and type of service. For all of them, Airtel uses several processes to verify customer information and combat fraud. For example, each new customer is photographed at the store. The photos are digitally watermarked with information such as the GPS coordinates where they were taken. That location is then compared with the store’s to verify that the customer is actually there to pick up the new SIM. Combining that photo and other PoI/PoA documents also ensures that the person isn’t going to other retailers to buy additional SIMs. “This has helped in elimination of fraud to a large extent,” says Harmeen Mehta, Bharti Airtel’s Global CIO.
Airtel built a system that uses QR codes and optical character recognition (OCR) to automate tasks such as reading PoI/PoA documents and filling out customer-acquisition forms. The OCR technology – which is so accurate that it’s been independently ranked as one of the best in the world– processes 30,000 documents in an hour during peak time.
For new customers, all this automation means that the onboarding process now takes about 10 minutes, which includes the step where a back-end team reviews their PoI/PoA documents looking for errors. When non-fraudulent mistakes are caught, retailers have the ability to correct and resubmit those documents so customers don’t have to start over. “This has helped reduce rejection cases from 9% to 5%,” says Mehta. “All [these] steps have helped in better customer experience, eliminating waste by removing paper, curbing fraud and ensuring national security.”
Airtel was founded in 1995. The operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) implemented over the decades created challenges to implementing a digital customer-acquisition system.
“Given our legacy BSS/OSS, it would not have been possible to manage such a delivery in record time without TM Forum’s Open Digital Framework,” Mehta says. “It enabled us to bring this capability first in the market amongst the established telecom operators in India.” Airtel used TM Forum’s Information Framework (also called SID), which provides standard definitions for all the information that flows through the enterprise and between service providers and their business partners. It also used TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (also known as eTOM), which is a comprehensive, industry-agreed, multi-layered view of the key business processes required to run an efficient, effective and agile digital enterprise. “Airtel followed TM Forum standards while building event-management integration frameworks,” Mehta says. “The Information and Business Process Frameworks helped Airtel enable a successful business transformation.”
A next-generation NOC is another key part of Airtel’s question to maximize customer satisfaction. “The NOC covers end-to-end experience monitoring for digital customer acquisition flow: right from the handsets of our retailers, which is our starting point of transaction, to our storage array,” Mehta says. “This ensures we cover end-to-end experience monitoring at NOC using AIOps [AI in operations]. The new NOC automates a wide variety of processes, resulting in two major benefits for customers: 80% less outages and, when they do occur, 50% less time spent resolving them. “We even track response times for each category of retailer handsets. With the help of this framework, not only we prevent outages but also, we ensure market is informed before the outage happens. This substantially enhances customer experience.” To learn more about Bharti Airtel’s digital transformation, read this three-part interview with Mehta.