Bharti Airtel is India's second-largest telecom operator with around 384 million customers as of May 2024 (data sourced from TRAI). Its Managing Director (MD) and CEO, Gopal Vittal has shared the method they are using to improve the customer experience for users. While Airtel has expanded in several categories of products and services, one thing is central to all of its customers - the network.
Vittal said, "Delivering exceptional experience continues to be the bedrock of our strategy. The heart of our business is the network since this is the core product that customers use us for."
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The biggest challenge for a company like Airtel is to keep subscriber churn in control, especially when there's a lower-cost alternative present. However, Airtel is doing it in a pretty smart way. The company has made small zones or grids of 1x1 kilometres to assess the performance. Hear it from Gopal to understand better.
"We have undertaken a massive drive to bring down mobile churn. The whole country is divided into a million grids of 1 kilometre by 1 kilometre, each of them having granular metrics associated with customer experience that is provided to our frontline sales team and our frontline engineers. With this way of working, we are reviewing and solving for churn at an individual site level through a mix of structural corrections as well as leveraging our digital network tools to proactively detect and solve issues," said Vittal.
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But things aren't this way just for mobile customers. Another major network business for Airtel is its fixed-line broadband services in the country. In terms of market share, Airtel is the second-largest FTTH (fiber-t0-the-home) player as well.
Gopal said, "We have also enhanced our network coverage and capacity by deploying 43,102 sites, strengthening our transport backbone by laying 55,982 route kilometres of fiber, and extending fiber home passes to 6.9 million more households."