The Hindu : Bharti Televenture's new initiatives

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 29, 2004

Business

Business

Bharti Televenture's new initiatives

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, FEB. 28. With competition turning fiercer by the day, the name of the game is CRM (customer relationship management). In a bid to beef up its interface with retail clients, mobile service provider Bharti Televenures Ltd. has embarked upon a host of whole new pioneering initiatives on the CRM front.

The exercise has already seen the company putting in place a customer service delivery team (CSD) - a strategic service unit under Anurag Parashar. The ostensible objective of this unit is to bring all interface points with customers under one platform. The focus of this unit will be on providing strong functional skills to various customer care initiatives in a centralised way.

According to Mr. Parashar, Bharti will invest around Rs.82 crores in the coming year to further ``revitalise all its customer interface points including more advanced technology and infrastructure and a number of customer delight initiatives.'' The company, it may be mentioned, had invested last year close to Rs.200 crores in the area of service delivery. Through these exercise, the company hopes to move from a transactional to a relationship approach with its customers.

Bharti is now proposing to leverage these technology investments by kick-starting a number of fresh - claimed to be the first such - initiatives on the CRM front. It has now come out with a simple-to-remember 24-hour toll-free single common customer care number - 121 - to facilitate anytime and anywhere access to all its Airtel brand of post-paid subscribers across the country even while roaming. Interestingly, the post-paid clients can use the same toll-free number for sending SMS, even while travelling abroad, says Mr. Anurag Parashar. The head of the CSD team claims that the latest initiatives will enable a customer view his/her monthly bill and transactions online. The toll-free number can be used to subscribe to value-added services by a customer while roaming. Just by dialling 121, a customer an access host of information about his account.

The company, Mr.Parashar says, is also working on various interactive features on its website, example the e-bill option. This will allow customers the option of viewing their monthly bills online and analysing their itemised call details.

The investment in technology is also aimed at enhancing customers' experience when they contact an Airtel call centre. For the pre-paid call centres, which are hitherto outsourced to small vendors, Bharti has decided to migrate them to BPO call centres.

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