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What makes Telenor India switch to a digitally driven IT?

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Soma Tah
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Anil Chopra & Thomas George

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Telenor India reduced its customer complaints by 80pc by re-aligning its business and internal IT processes, smart use of open source analytics, and integration of all customer connect channels, to name a few. We had a face to face chat with Avinash Mittal, Head IT for Telenor India to understand how the telecom giant digitally transform itself to achieve this remarkable feat. Here’s the complete interview.

What are your digital transformation triggers?

Telenor Group carries an ambition of becoming the preferred partner in the digital journey of its customers. To realize this ambition, the entire value chain and ecosystem has to be geared up accordingly, starting from employees having a digital mindset to resources, processes and partners being digitally transformed.

Thia makes it imperative for us to know our customers, partners and other key stakeholders well to be able to provide relevant digital services. Through data network analytics, we proactively measure customer experience and gauge the happenings around the ecosystem. This would lead to service excellence as we proactively work out improvement areas rather than waiting for customers to complaint.

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We are also evaluating contextual scenarios which focus on real time feedback and analysis. It helps us assess customer needs, requirements and then offer them relevant products & services. So first by offering the right mix at the right time, we make our services more meaningful and second by selecting the right medium of communication, we make it more receptive.avinash-mittal-photo

Could you explain the contextual scenarios more in detail?

In India, low balance is a real challenge and often, customers don’t even know that they have low balance. But imagine if a message could be flashed on a customer’s screen giving options to recharge immediately or avail an instant credit through a USSD code or by a simple call to customer service. This takes customer experience to all new level.

Another scenario could be when a customer gets an option to transfer his talk time value to meet his data needs. Yet another one is where the customer is offered a system integrated with his bank account or wallet service where the amount gets debited without interrupting the service.

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What’s Telenor’s approach to digital transformation in regards to enhancing revenue and offering more value to customers?

It is about offering relevant services at the right time and bringing a positive impact on a customer’s life. If we are relevant, customers will use our services and revenue will flow. In telecom the maturity of ecosystem and collaboration between partners also plays an important role in success of a product or service.

We are working with other industry partners to use our business analytics and offer innovative services to our customers. Our free life insurance and Telenor Tatkal credit are good examples of how we are working with partners to offer more value to our customers. While the insurance service helps us extend the financial security net to the masses, Tatkal credit ensures that our customers are never low on balance and are always connected. Instant alerts and easy-to-use menu to subscribe to these services have made them very popular among of customers.

How are you aligning your IT team to this?

It is all about transforming from voice-centric IT systems to digitally driven IT ecosystems. It’s an API driven world. For our self-care channel for customers, we worked on a complete API-driven architecture. Whether it is our website, mobile app, IVR , self-care, etc. in our ecosystem, whichever channel a customer touches, he/she will get same info from the same source, so it’s single point of truth.

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We’re focusing on business processes. Typically, IT organizations talk about the systems. In earlier years, we said we’ll not talk about the systems as they all are hygiene factors and they need to work since these are basics. So we’ve completely moved to business processes and analyzed how the entire structure is working, what are the human touch points in the market, what are the system touch points, how each system is interacting with each other. Individual system may work fine, but when multiple systems interact with each other there is data mismatch or failures that nobody cares. This is when we analyzed all critical business processes, and identified the problem of educating the market, where they’re not working as per correct business processes.

Then we looked at the entire flow of the IT systems, and how they’re working with each other. If there are 100 requests coming, which is flowing into seven systems, all 100 requests should flow across all seven systems, we’re ensuring that. Then we also introduced proactive monitoring for all business data transactions. What’s the trend in UP East on a Monday as compared to the same time in the last few weeks? Now if that trend is breached by a few percentage points, something might be wrong. It might be different market offerings in the business or something wrong inside the systems. An alert will pop up and we’ll see if it’s an IT issue.

Normally in earlier times, if there was a customer complaint, then the retailers would complaint, and then after an hour or so, the market would start complaining that there’s some problem across some activation or recharge. Now we say you don’t need to tell us. First we’ll try to prevent it, and in the rarest of cases, if we’re not able to, we’ll communicate to you that this is the problem and this is the time we’ll take to resolve it. There are bypass mechanisms, so that if one fails, the system will route to the other mechanism.

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Have you changed a lot of systems to bring single version of truth?

We are doing continuous architecture simplification. We have replaced some complicated applications, focused on data masters and minimum replications. Our focus is on API-based integration and assurance where we continuously focus on cost because if we’re able to offer in the market at low cost, our IT systems have to be very efficient. So we continuously simplify our architecture, keep it simple and find out means to continuously virtualize moving towards open source, right capacity management and ensuring scalability without additional investments. We are continuously green in global cost benchmarks also.

Then we’ve also focused on our internal users—laptop problems, mobile phone problems, etc. as a majority of employees’ touch point into IT is their laptop, WiFi, and mobile. That drives the productivity. We’ve done a lot of action around that to give a seamless experience.

What about the need to be agile, because if you need to keep introducing new things, you need to be agile?

Earlier we had a business requirements prioritization forum, where every thing had to be justified on the basis of business needs. But unlike old economy business, telecom is very dynamic, so you really need to deliver the market needs fast. Therefore, we have now introduced new processes- wherein market requirements are evaluated on a weekly basis and then we’re ensuring the whole backend system delivers it on fast track mode. We are now using a mix of agile and waterfall methods and results are extremely good. Almost every week or fortnight, IT delivers new business functionalities to support the business better and make it more efficient.

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You’re also analyzing data. Have you made any changes to be able to analyze data in real time?

We collate data through change data capture (CDC) kind of systems. We get data in real time and then we push it as a dashboard to the business. But this type of data is just information. Now we are implementing real time analytics. Here all data is processed in real or near real time and then based on the analysis we’ll leverage this in the market place through contextual marketing.

You said you’re using a lot of open source?

We’re highly focused on benefitting from open source software. In all transformation projects we have incorporated open source platforms and cloud based services. In analytics plan, we are trying to leverage Hadoop and other Big Data open source ecosystem. We have a robust disaster recovery (DR) process in place from a network perspective, but we are not as strong on backend IT side. We are exploring possibilities to have a cloud based DR system. In the initial phases we are incorporating virtualization and using open source applications in data center too.

Have the metrics also changed for the IT team, internally, as compared to earlier?

The metrics have changed completely. IT team is now measured on IT perception index, which ensures that business and IT see the performance from the same glass. The IT perception index is based on our SLA, and monthly survey of stakeholders and IT NPS.

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If the overall IT perception index goes down, then there’s a clear KRA breach and it needs to be fixed. We’re trying to work in a DevOps model. The operations team has a clear KRA about the development work, and vice versa. Together they have to work as one team to be successful. Driving cost efficiency is a collective target and so is the process enhancement and bringing defects to zero level. Adding business value and driving innovation remains key focus area.

What changes have you done to your IT team? Any new skillsets introduced?

It’s basically a mindset change. The team is focused on aligning with the business processes better and leverage new technologies to be more efficient. And of course, keep every thing simple. We said you need to learn, because if you don’t keep learning, you’ll become irrelevant. That’s what we do. We keep having meetings with different partners who’re relevant in various markets. We do PoC for new ideas, and adopt new technologies. We do not hesitate in taking risks and introducing new concepts. The results have been encouraging so far.

What has been the impact of such initiatives?

So far we have achieved 80pc reduction in user facing tickets related to IT, over the past 2.5 years and we are now aiming for zero defect.

We’ve changed our SLAs with our partners, which was again system uptime, but now it’s process uptime. The end result should be that when a customer walks in, buys a SIM, and when the activation request comes in, within 3 minutes it should be fulfilled. If the retailer is doing a recharge, but not entering the right pin code, we’re still trying to educate him and if he follows the process, the IT backend ensures that it’s processed.

 

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