Introduced by Airtel in India, the popular Hello tune services complete 9 years of their presence in the country. Over the years they have become more personalized and successfully acquired 50 million users in the Indian market thereby registering 20% growth year on year. The service behind the popular Hello Tunes is the Caller ring back tone service (CRBT), first deployed by South Korean Telecom, which made a use of the Network Signaling Path to play a musical tone instead of the usual TRING TRING frequency. However it was in July 2004 that Airtel launched its CRBT service in India under the brand name ‘Hello Tunes’ with A.R. Rahman’s Signature Brand tune as the most popular hello tune on the airtel system in that particular year.
Alongside the evolution of smartphones, the hello tunes associated with them have also witnessed innovation. Last year, Airtel launched a more personalized form of Hello tunes called ‘Nametunes’, post it getting launched by Tata Docomo and Aircel, that enables customers to personalize their caller tunes with their names in it. This was done by mapping the customer acquisition form details to the product application. Further, it got evolved to ‘Celebrity NameTunes’ wherein the customers can greet their callers with names uttered by celebs.
As hello tunes turn 9, they seem to have made a decent impact on the customers, accounting for approx 160 cr per month size of the business industry.
