Vodafone Idea (Vi) has been one of the most active companies in the private telecom sector when it comes to forming new partnerships. If you are a Vi fan and have been following the company closely, you know the multiple partnerships the telco has formed in the last year. The partnership model for Vi is the right one because it doesn't involve investing a huge sum of funds into building a platform, and partnering with an established brand just adds more credibility to its services of Vi. It is a win-win situation for both companies (Vi and its partner).
Abhijit Kishore, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Vodafone Idea, in an exclusive interaction with TelecomTalk, shared what is next for Vi.
Watch the entire conversation on YouTube.
What is Next for Vodafone Idea (Vi)?
Abhijit said, "You know, we are always looking for something new, and we as an organisation, from a customer experience point of view, are always on the lookout for what really makes sense, rather than bombarding with things that we want to give to our customer and hence we are very careful and mindful in choosing what we will do and as I started by saying that we have a principle of looking at what can be really scalable and what can be sustainable. We don't want to do something that we do today that is not sustained, and it should be something that we can really get to the customers.
So there are multiple things that are there in the pipeline. But before I get there, I think it is very important here to note that, as I said, we are very early in the digital curve. One of the tasks which is very clearly cut out for us is to ensure that we are able to communicate and educate our customers to use more and more digital assets.
What is new? I would like to talk about two things. We are going to launch a natural language processing-based voice conversation bot, which is text-to-speech and speech-to-text. We are already using them as a pilot in roughly 13 circles. The good feature and the capability that this bot has is what we call smart intercept, which really stops when a customer starts speaking or asking some questions. So it is a very highly interactive voice bot that we are very excited to get to our customers.
The second one is a journey that we have travelled over the last couple of years on the way we onboard our customers. We are also going to introduce a self-KYC where customers sitting at their homes, offices, wherever, just by an OTP can get themselves activated, and we will courier the SIM card to their home address or the office address, as the case may be. This is 100% secure. So I think these are some of the very defining digital assets and digital journeys that you know we create. Some of the things that I am talking about are actually the need of the hour. So these are some of the things that are there in the pipeline that I can talk about right now."