Enabling The Omnichannel Experience
AS would be true for the telecom sector per se, Airtel had an interesting 2021. The telecom major stayed focused on a slew of activities and omnichannel emerged as the latest buzzword in customer experience. “Our focus is to digitise our core businesses, that is mobility, broadband, DTH and B2B and enable an omnichannel experience for our customers. Today, Airtel customers can switch seamlessly between online and offline channels for a consistent experience, wherever they are,” says Adarsh Nair, CEO, Airtel Digital & Chief Product Officer, Airtel.
The telecom major’s core businesses have helped extract four foundational platform strengths, as per Nair, which include network, data, payments and distribution. By leveraging these platforms, Airtel aims to build new digital businesses and revenue streams, some of which comprise the likes of Airtel IQ, Airtel Secure, and Airtel Ads.
“Airtel already has one of the biggest digital ecosystems in India with nearly 200 million MAU across its three platforms – Airtel Thanks, Wynk Music and Airtel Xstream. Our Mitra App for Airtel retailers is one of the largest platforms of its kind in India,” informs Nair.
Radical Escalation
Reflecting on the year so far, Nair agrees that the growth of digital services usage seen in the pandemic year continues to have repercussions that impact consumer behaviour and their expectations from their tech platforms.
“One of the biggest challenges during the pandemic was that everyone needed connectivity, whether it was mobility or broadband. We saw a big shift as connectivity moved from offices to homes. Two key technologies became essential for us to help our consumers. The first was the method by which our customers could pay and acquire products all through digital mechanisms. In fact, at the peak of the covid surge, we saw that our online channels contributed 70 per cent of our revenues,” informs Nair.
It became critical for Airtel at this time to keep its field workforce that was on-ground, safe and optimised as there were lesser people on the ground. “We brought in new tools and technologies to automate our workforce management through Airtel Work which become a significant tool to help improve onground efficiency and safety,” Nair adds.
The Cloud Advantage
Among the various digital services launched, Nair is optimistic about the likes of Airtel IQ Cloud Service for the customers, which he believes brings added benefits to its consumers in a competitive and saturated market. Airtel IQ is a cloud-communications suite that includes call, SMS and video solutions that enable businesses to automate their customer engagement. Including Airtel, many brands across India realised the need to reach their customers in a contactless fashion. This means the ability to reach customers through digital channels and calls became more and more important.
This also has application in contactless commerce. Elaborating on this, Nair says, “Imagine a scenario, where a retailer would visit a shop and discuss their needs, now, that entire discussion was through a phone call or over WhatsApp. Products such as Airtel IQ provide an automated way by which contactless communication can be made possible through apps and other ecosystems.”
He explains that what differentiates Airtel IQ is that the communication gets orchestrated inside Airtel’s network. “This offers telco-grade security along with an intuitive platform that customers can integrate with a set of APIs. Airtel is India’s largest telco in enterprise connectivity space and serves over one million businesses of all sizes. These unique strengths position us well for this segment and we are already seeing excellent uptake,” Nair comments.
5G & IoT
Airtel has seen success in the 5G trials, with speeds as high as 1.2Gbps. Airtel is testing a variety of use cases for 5G, including the likes of cloud gaming, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) and real-time audio solutions for artists to collaborate online.
With the internet of things (IoT) based solutions becoming an important segment, Airtel is also leveraging 5G technology in this area. “Airtel IoT is an end-to-end platform with the capability to connect and manage billions of devices and applications in a highly secure and seamless fashion. At its core is Airtel’s robust 5G ready network that comes with the option to deploy NB-IoT, 4G or 2G connectivity using Airtel e-SIM technology. It also has a flexible set of APIs which allows enterprises to streamline the process of connecting, collecting, and analysing data through their existing workflow tools with Airtel’s guarantee,” explains Nair.
With the accelerated adoption of the IoT ecosystem in daily business operations, Airtel Business has also developed industry-specific use cases to address customer pain points and drive business value.
As per a Frost & Sullivan’s Mobile Services Report Q4 FY21, Airtel IoT had the highest revenue share of 45.5 per cent in the Enterprise M2M (machine to machine) category in India. Airtel IoT currently supports over 6 million managed IoT connections, including a range of vertical-specific solutions like industrial asset monitoring, smart metering and vehicle telematics with an “innovative approach” to building IoT solutions, as per Nair. Airtel Business leverages its pan-India network to provide customers with IoT connectivity irrespective of their size, industry, or location. MG Motor, Pine Labs, Paytm, Kirloskar, BSES, Genus, Kent, Black Buck, Meghalaya Power Distribution Corporation and Odisha Power Transmission Company are among the enterprises that are already using Airtel’s IoT solutions.
Customer ‘Voice’
Airtel is leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to transform customer experience across its services and digital platforms. A large team of data scientists at Airtel are working on leveraging vast volumes of data sets available within Airtel to derive insights and apply technology solutions to further simplify customer journeys. Airtel has adopted an AI-driven approach to serving its customers by building its own-built speech analytics platform, differing from ‘traditional audio mining’, customised for the Indian market.
“This speech analytics platform is powered by an intelligent Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) engine and transforms the way we understand ‘voice’ of the customer. This technology enables you to convert audio files to text, offering the capability to perform in-depth searches of specific phrases or words, identification of hold times, silent patches, and agents talking over. With this platform, Airtel is now able to monitor the experience offered by their agents over every single customer call. The power of transcribing and analysing calls gives Airtel complete information on the needs of the customer, allowing us to serve our customers better,” says Nair.
Customised Experience
Some of its digital businesses have upped the focus on personalisation as the route for future growth. This is specifically true for Wynk Music. ML and AI capabilities are an integral part of Airtel’s personalisation platform to serve the right content to its users, simply because of the scale of the problem. Millions of content titles have to be matched with users. To give a sense of the scale, Airtel processes 6.5 TB (after compression) of data every day, from 6.8B signals.
“‘Personalised Mixes’ is one of the flagship products enabled by AI. It enables us to hyper personalise recommendation for a given user and then serves it to the user in easy to understand themes or playlists. About 12 per cent of our users use this ML-powered product every day, and a whopping 40 per cent of their daily consumption comes from only this,” Nair adds.
He points out that to cater to the unique needs of India, extra efforts must be made. In the current scenario, a large portion of Indian music is not well classified and labelled with genres. This is why one of the capabilities Wynk Music has developed is the mood detection of a song. “This is a deep convolutional neural network-based classifier that takes the spectrogram of an audio file as the input and outputs the probability of mood classes,” remarks Nair, adding, “Airtel is one of the first companies ever to do this, and one of its early user-out applications are the ‘mood mixes’. One of the moods that are the most consumed and searched these days is soulful music, in line with the times.” Making AI Work Harder.
Making AI Work Harder
Another area where Airtel makes use of AI for a better experience is its network tower prediction. Today, teams at Airtel are using AI/ ML capabilities to identify complex and core network problems, aiming to resolve these even before they appear. “This is done through robust network planning using computer vision, capturing every single network interaction to identify problematic areas to improve network experience and look at areas that require network optimisation or new site deployment. We are heavily leveraging computer vision to efficiently identify clusters where there is no or minimal coverage.
Today, our custom in-house deep learning semantic image segmentation capability consumes satellite images and generates deep insights about buildings, vegetation and terrain. This helps our network planning teams analyse any area in India within days as opposed to months, while also drastically reducing man-hours in network site planning,” Nair informs.
This data science-driven network planning has allowed Airtel teams to plan network sites in villages that are not part of any census and demographic data reports. Airtel’s innovation ecosystem will focus on a few areas in the year ahead. These include 5G, media and entertainment, digital advertising technologies, cloud communication, financial services and so on. These are new businesses that it is launching in the market.
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