Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Telecommunications Firm Decreases Average Call Handling Time by 15 Percent, Increases Profitability
Overview
Country or Region: India
Industry: Telecommunications
Customer Profile
Aircel is the leading mobile service provider in India with operations in 23 telecom zones covering complete geography of India. With over 50 million mobile subscribers, Aircel is a full-fledged national operator.
Business Situation
A disparate IT network at Aircel included 10 LOB applications and over 130 VAS applications. Limited integration made it difficult for call center executives to efficiently access data and respond to customers.
Solution
Aircel implemented Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, an innovative solution that provides all information in a single framework.
Benefits
n Cuts AHT by 15 percent
n Reduces operational costs
n Increases up sell and cross sell revenue opportunity / “Now with call handling processes running more smoothly, we are able to reduce call center staff thus realizing substantial savings since deploying Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.”
Ravinder Jain, Chief Information Officer, Aircel Ltd.
With over 50 million happy customers, Aircel is the fastest growing mobile operator in the country. The company’s commitment to customer service prompted it to review its disparate architecture. As many as 10line-of-business (LOB) applicationsand over 130value added services (VAS) applications, with little integration between them, hindered user efficiency and responsiveness. Aircel was looking for ways to reduce call-handling time, decrease cost and boost revenues. To achieve this, Aircel implemented Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and was able to consolidate data and place it at users’ fingertips. The company has since cut average handling time by 15 percent, reduced sales overhead, increased cross sell and up sell revenue opportunity.
Situation
The Aircel Group is a joint venture between Maxis Communications Berhad of Malaysia (74 percent equity) and Apollo Hospital Enterprise Ltd of India (26 percent equity). It is a partnership of two flourishing brands, each a leader on its own turf. The Aircel Group, formed in 1994, offers affordable and outstanding mobile services to a vast subscriber base in India.
Commencing operations in 1999, Aircel focuses on mobile internet positioning. It has driven the value added services (VAS) consumption from 4 percent of its annual revenue to a double digit of its annual revenue in just 2 years. The company has a strong focus on customer experience, and the business focuses on providing customer care at all touch points.
Aircel’s customer care organization services 50 million customers across 23 telecom circles per day with 24X7, 3,000-seater call centers across the country. Seamless access to customer data is vital for maintaining highest quality of customer service. However, a call center employee would need to query 10line-of-business (LOB) applicationsand over 130VAS applications to fetch relevant information and respond to queries. Navigating 140 disparate applications for each call was a tedious and time-consuming activity and often led to errors as the applications did not auto refresh with each call. This meant that the average call lasted 3 minutes, while the hold time per customer was 11 seconds per call. The response and hold times were bringing down the overall customer satisfaction rating.
Ravinder Jain, Chief Information Officer, Aircel says, “Call centre employees took a long time to answer requests or queries. The reason being, when customers called, the support team had to search through a number of different systems for the information they needed to respond to the query.”
He continues, “Due to the cumbersome nature of the system, Average Handling Time (AHT) for customer calls was high, impacting overall cost-per-call and threatening to affect customer satisfaction levels. Call handling times were escalating, even though the in-bound call center headcount was high in order to accommodate increasing volumes.”
Aircel found that its disparate legacy systems were simply no longer equipped to support the aggressive growth rate. The company knew it was imperative to find a solution that would consolidate all of its customer data into a unified agent desktop, shorten AHT, reduce sales staff overhead, and increase cross sell and up sell revenue opportunity.
Solution
Given the competitive landscape of Indian telecom business, Aircel worked closely with Microsoft to deploy and customize the Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The CCA focuses on delivering contact center enabling functionality, such as the ability to create a unified desktop by combining data elements from disparate line-of-business applications and displaying it in a single user interface.
An innovative solution, CCA configures any web-based applications in just a few minutes. Another key feature is the Service Integration Framework, which can render the output of any web service without writing any service specific code. This enables the agent to understand customer demographics easily. Krishna Basudevan, Chief Enterprise Architect, Aircel says, “The goal was to create a single interface across all applications, to ensure increased customer satisfaction while bringing down operational costs.”
Using Enterprise Application Integration Framework, Aircel integrated information from various LOB and VAS applications with computer telephony integration (CTI) to create a customer snapshot. The existing ecosystem of applications was retained while integrating it into a single framework. It brings together information from different applications into a single view, enabling the company to develop deeper and more valuable customer relationships, and improve the quality of the customer experience across all channels.
Krishna says, “Agents adoptand use the new framework with ease as it provides a 360 degree view of the customer as soon as the call is transferred to the agent. It gives them an instant view of detailed information.”
Agents were brought up to speed on the Customer Care Framework (CCF) with its in built training kit. This not only makes the agents productive almost immediately but also helps the organization bring down training costs. Deployed in under six months, the solution was implemented in two phases across 22 cities in India.
Benefits
Aircel has reached the highest levels of customer satisfaction, dramatically increased sales, and cut costs since deploying the Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Cuts AHT by 15 Percent
The new solution enabled the Aircel to aggregate its disparate applications into a single user interface, removing the need for agents to toggle amongst multiple applications to locate customer information. “The new 360 degree customer view and process automation saves up to 15 percent AHT,” says Ravinder Jain, Chief Information Officer, Aircel. “It enables the agent to deliver information quickly and accurately, thus resolving customers query faster. This in turn increases customer satisfaction significantly; refining the customer support standards in the country.”
Reduces Operational Costs
With the deployment of the new solution, call center processes are streamlined and overheads reduced significantly.
The significant reduction in AHT and handling time precipitates a direct reduction of operational cost and significant savings to the organization on account of manpower, infrastructure support and application management.
“Before deploying this solution, we had lengthy call-handling times which required a huge call center staff leading to larger overheads,” states Ravinder. “Now with call handling processes running more smoothly, we are able to reduce call center staff thus realizing substantial savings since deploying Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.”
Increases Up Sell and Cross Sell Revenue Opportunity
Earlier, disparate systems did not offer agents with information that would help increase revenue opportunity. However, the new solution presents data analysis from various applications such as demographics, behavioural patterns, mobile phone capabilities etc., and suggests products and services the customer is likely to be interested. These result in significant up sell and cross sell revenue opportunity.
“With the innovative project delivered pan India, the customer experience on call centre as touch point has improved significantly, not to mention, saved cost too,” says Ravinder Jain, Chief Information Officer, Aircel. Overall, we have seen our sales increase by approximately 15 percent.”
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systemsthat your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:
www.microsoft.com/dynamics