Bharti Airtel, India's second-largest telecom operator, recently announced a new partnership with Vonage, an American cloud communications provider and a subsidiary of Ericsson. But why did Airtel decide to partner with Vonage? That's the question that Abhishek Biswal, Chief Business Officer, Digital Services, Bharti Airtel explained to TelecomTalk along the sidelines at IMC 2024.
Today, businesses interact with customers and customers interact with businesses via calls and messages. Sometimes, these communications also happen informally between the contact center agents and the customers. These conversations end up not being recorded or monitored. This is a loss for the business/organisation.
On this note, Biswal said, "We saw a gap in the market".
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"How do we give them (referring to businesses) a tool that the communication is efficient and useful and it is compliant, it is regulated, the employer has knowledge about who you are talking to; is recorded, etc," said Biswal.
To solve this communication gap, the two companies have partnered and launched a new app/platform which can be downloaded on the go. This platform is called Airtel IQ Business Connect.
David Cargill, Senior Product Director, Vonage told TelecomTalk, "First of all, you are looking at a new dynamic market and the digitalisation is you know, it is hard to believe until you are here. And so we started looking at it carefully, you know, we defined the product with the product team under Abhishek, and it was then we went to the whole process of building that, and it's cloud-based.
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We are live in Mumbai and it's delivered through the app to the end users - we are talking about relationship managers, so they then have that one app that they can use to call, to message, keep all of the communications within the same ecosystem, and they are recorded, so they are compliant. The managers can listen into the calls and they can prompt them through whisper and things. So it's a really focused product that we feel we have put on this market."
When asked if this partnership is exclusive to Airtel and if Vonage will also partner with Airtel's competitors, David said, "We are focusing with Airtel. It's been a long journey to get here and there's no idea of them going wider than that. It's very much a joint venture, really, to get this far."
What About Competition offering Similar Stuff? Does This Already Exist?
This is not the first time a company is offering a cloud based communication platform to enterprises so that the businesses can interact with the customers. When asked about this, Biswal said, "So there are actually, no, if I look at any channel, there's somebody who only does voice, there's somebody who does maybe WhatsApp, there's somebody who will be doing SMS. All of this together on one application, and the application works on your phone, works on your tablet, works on your desktop, I don't think there's anyone in that space."
