New Delhi: Jai Menon shot to the limelight about four years ago as the brains behind Bharti Airtel Ltd’s big push on outsourcing network and tech management functions to vendors such as Telefon AB LM Ericsson, Nokia Oyj, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Oracle Corp. Instead of carrying such fixed costs on its balance sheet, Bharti Airtel, India’s biggest mobile phone services firm, converted the expense into an operational cost linked to efficiency and usage levels.
These days, Menon is trying to drive similar changes in customer service at Airtel, which had some 75 million customers. In an industry infamous for its poor customer service and technology support, Airtel’s group chief information officer and director of technology customer service wants to change the way phone subscribers are served by placing incentives before its outsourced service firms to focus on the outcome of customer interaction.
In an interview, he explains how he expects this to change his company as it aims to reach 125 million customers by 2010. Edited excerpts:
How have the last quarters been?
Cutting edge: Menon says a new initiative he had just completed was a platinum centre to take care of the end-to-end life cycle of the customer. Madhu Kapparath / Mint
The DNA of the service that I injected in has been that in service we need to do three things: One, we need to be cognizant of the fact that there is customer pain and how do you prevent pain ahead of time. Once you know that there is pain then only can you work towards driving the benefits from a customer point of view. Second, how do you cure pain; in case there is any queries and concerns that customers have, how do you have a rapid response? The third one is delighter—how do you delight the consumer?
To get to this, if I had to look at the top three programmes that we have put together for service—one is implement a very solid shared service capability for all customers including business to business and business to consumer (B2C).
Second one is, empower the customer enormously through self care, and the third one is, building intelligence in to service so that you can actually do customized service. Something like a concierge service but not the expensive kind.
Any of this being driven by models used elsewhere?
A few things are, but a few things we are inventing for the first time in the world. Within shared services, there are some best practices we are adopting from the world...one practice is taking all the fragmented shared services and consolidating them. For example, we have now consolidated 105 agencies that did our address verification work to four agencies. This allows us to build quality control and repeatability into the system. It has taken about a year to finish this.