Airtel Declares War on Service Failure and Targets Resolution of Every Customer Query

Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”), India’s largest integrated telco, is further raising the bar as part of its mission to deliver best-in-class services to customers.

Keeping consumer obsession at the core of its DNA, Airtel today said that it has set itself a target of answering and resolving every single customer query, learn quickly from failures and ensure they don’t get repeated. And the company is taking this message to customers across India through a bold multi-channel marketing campaign [‘watch it here https://youtu.be/Gqe3uJLLV3c].

The current times have put telecom services and reliable connectivity at the core of the daily lives of customers. Be it Work from Home, Virtual Classrooms, Online shopping, or Digital Entertainment, telecom networks have become the backbone for accomplishing most things from within the safety of our homes.

Consumer centricity has always been at the heart of everything that Airtel does, but during these testing times, the brand has realized that a network provider’s responsibility towards its customers has never been greater. Airtel acknowledges that it not only has the responsibility to provide access to high-quality telecom services but also to give answers to all their service related queries by responding and resolving them in a quick and transparent manner.

Says Shashwat Sharma, Chief Marketing Officer, Bharti Airtel, “The relationship between Airtel and its customers has never been more important, and to serve them even better we have decided to take our customer obsession to the next level. We know that "ZERO questions" is an IMPOSSIBLE utopian thought especially for a telecom brand, but that won’t stop us from trying because we know that the closer we get to ZERO, the happier our customers will be. We promise to be humble, learn every time we fail and be relentless in our approach. For us, this is not just a campaign, we are now re-engineering the entire organization towards this goal and are obsessed with building a culture of consumer centricity.”

The company has already taken big strides in this journey and these are some of its key recent initiatives to make sure that customers get the best possible service experience:

Network Technology: In the last three years, Airtel has invested over Rs 70,000 crores in high-speed network rollouts. Airtel has led the introduction of new technologies such as pre-5G Massive MIMO and Carrier Aggregation. The result is Airtel being consistently rated as India’s top mobile network by multiple experts.

More recently, Airtel became the first mobile operator in India to launch Voice over Wi-Fi to solve the indoor coverage issues faced by its customers. Today, millions of happy customers enjoy seamless indoor coverage over Airtel Vo-Wi-Fi.

For its busy postpaid consumers, Airtel’s launched Platinum Network. This gives its premium users priority in both network as well as services across their touch-points, so that network and telecom related issues don’t disrupt their hectic schedules.

Digital Gateways: To help customers recharge during COVID-19 lockdown, Airtel launched ‘Superhero’ - a first of its kind program that allowed Airtel customers to recharge the prepaid accounts of fellow Airtel customers through Airtel Thanks app. For every recharge, the Super-hero makes a 4% retail commission. This helped millions of customers who don’t have access to online recharge options or are not digitally savvy. Over a million Airtel customers are registered as Superheroes.

Culture of Customer Obsession: The Airtel Management Board meets every day in the morning to review customer queries, resolution mechanisms and timelines, and the learnings from customer feedback.           

Airtel’s new campaign will run across TV, Digital and Print to communicate the company’s promise to customers. The campaign has been conceived by Dentsu-Taproot, led by Pallavi Chakravarti and team. To watch the TVC click here https://youtu.be/Gqe3uJLLV3c.

Will IBM develop future chips with DNA?

Scientists from IBM and California Institute of Technology are trying to build the next generation chips- smaller and more powerful, with the combination of DNA and nanotechnology. The experimental breakthrough can be a step toward developing a new technique for making smaller microprocessors beyond the traditional manufacturing processes.

In the past few years, chipmakers have been able to make tinier and powerful products, but this advancement has also pushed the limits of manufacturing techniques. According to IBM, "The revolutionary method, developed at its Almaden Research Center in California and the California Institute of Technology, can help it to make computer chips from the molecule, by arranging DNA structures on the surface of manufactured semiconductor material." Microchips are mainly used in computers, mobile phones and a broad range of electronic devices and, as chipmakers compete to develop ever-smaller chips at cheaper prices, designers are struggling to cut costs.

Spike Narayan, Research Manager, IBM said, "The biological structures like DNA actually offer some very reproducible, repetitive kinds of patterns that we can actually leverage in semiconductor processes. The combination of this directed self-assembly with today's fabrication technology for high-resolution positioning of nano-objects eventually can lead to substantial savings in the most expensive and challenging part of the chip making process." This combination can also help processor designers to keep pace with Moore's Law - the 40-plus-year-old prediction by Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years.

The cost involved in shrinking features to improve performance is a limiting factor in keeping pace with Moore's Law and a concern across the semiconductor industry. Currently, the semiconductor industry is able to make processors using 22 nanometer manufacturing technology. IBM is also looking for the DNA to act as scaffolds or miniature circuit boards for the highly precise assembly of chip components, like nanotubes, nanowires and nanoparticles. After using this technique, manufacturers are likely to build 'significantly smaller' chips than has been possible with current semiconductor fabrication technology.

Agencies