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<strong>Together</strong> <strong>good</strong> <strong>things</strong> <strong>happen</strong><br />
customers<br />
Bharti <strong>Airtel</strong> since its inception has been at the forefront of<br />
technology & has pioneered several innovations which have been<br />
the catalysts for outstanding telecom growth in the country.<br />
During the last year, Bharti <strong>Airtel</strong> has consolidated its market<br />
leadership position despite of the hyper competition being witnessed<br />
in this category. Testimony to this is the rapidly growing family<br />
of happy <strong>Airtel</strong> customers which has crossed 130 mn mark.<br />
Innovations have been the main focus for Bharti <strong>Airtel</strong> in the recent<br />
past. These innovations not only help in making customer’s life<br />
easier but also help the Company in building new revenue<br />
streams for the future.<br />
One of the major leap Bharti <strong>Airtel</strong> took this year in the VAS field was<br />
launching of the App Store. The launch of this service has extended the<br />
reach of app stores to all the basic phone users from the current<br />
smart phone users. It supports over 550 devices across all major<br />
operating systems making it a totally device agnostic platform. It<br />
has seen over 2.5 mn downloads within just first month of its<br />
launch with bulk of these customers coming from tier II cities. <strong>Airtel</strong><br />
also launched m-bazaar, a utilitarian & livelihood enhancing service,<br />
it bridges the information divide, enabling the mobile user to get<br />
classified on the go. Be it jobs, matrimonial, real estate or buying &<br />
selling <strong>good</strong>s. Overall 4 mn consumers are using this service.<br />
`Keeping in mind the rapidly increasing rural base, <strong>Airtel</strong> also<br />
launched IFFCO Green card. It is an innovative system to create<br />
localised content and deliver it to the farmers in their language of<br />
preference.<br />
Bharti <strong>Airtel</strong> Annual Report 2009-10<br />
This service aggregates content from over 38,000 IFFCO societies<br />
spread across India and delivers it to consumers who live in<br />
the vicinity of these societies.Heeding the growing interest in<br />
soccer among youth, the Company offers rich football content<br />
on the mobile from the hugely popular Manchester United<br />
Club (the Red Devils) and has also tied up to enable<br />
participation in the Manchester United Soccer School program.<br />
Moreover, subscribers can win trips to key matches in Europe<br />
featuring the team. These offerings have struck an emotional<br />
chord with customers.<br />
In another part of the spectrum, Value Added Services (VAS) now<br />
include <strong>Airtel</strong> Mobile TV which enables one to watch television<br />
shows and bulletins on their mobile. In the realm of<br />
broadband services, the Company launched the ‘<strong>Airtel</strong> Online<br />
Desktop’ powered by Microsoft and Nivio, and followed this<br />
up with its advent into cloud computing, the latest paradigm<br />
in collaborative computing.<br />
It has launched the low-cost ready-to-use ‘<strong>Airtel</strong> Net PC’ for its<br />
customers in the National Capital Region (NCR). The Company<br />
pioneered 50 mbps broadband - the fastest wireline<br />
broadband on VDSL2 in the country. The Company in its<br />
constant endeavor of providing superior internet browsing<br />
experience upgraded all its customers to a minimum speed of<br />
512 kbps and doubled the speed thereafter up till 2 mbps for<br />
all existing customers at no additional cost.<br />
Customer service has been a key differentiator that sets <strong>Airtel</strong> apart and makes us a preferred service provider. Last year also saw significant<br />
capability and investments being made in area of customer service to enhance the quality of experience for our customers.<br />
In keeping with our philosophy of empowering customers & making life easy for customers, we have created several extremely<br />
easy to use “self-service” products - (including on the mobile) - most of which have been Industry firsts. These include interactive<br />
SMS, USSD, start/stop, MAMO (My <strong>Airtel</strong> My offer) etc. Several of these services on the mobile are available in vernacular<br />
languages and plans are underway to provide all mobile based self service in vernacular in the coming year. We were and remain<br />
the first and only Indian operator to provide our customers the ‘start-stop’ service for VAS, which provides our customers an<br />
extremely easy and powerful channel to subscribe-unsubscribe VAS at will. These customer empowerment initiatives have been<br />
received extremely well by our customers with ~500 mn transactions being witnessed every month on these channels.<br />
We have set up a Resource Management Center (RMC) and a Service Management Centre (SMC) during the year which will help<br />
us enhance the experience for our customers by enabling us to be pro-active as well as providing our front line executives with<br />
the ability to handle calls and complaints in a significantly better fashion.<br />
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