Uninor's Customer Information Management improves operational efficiency

Uninor, the 100% subsidiary of Norway-based telecom company Telenor Group, has over 45 million subscribers in its six commercially available circles of UP (West), UP (East), Bihar (including Jharkhand), Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. The company offers only pre-paid GSM mobile services and its current network footprint covers over 50% of India’s population.

Uninor’s three-pillar strategy of being the best in basic services, mass market distribution and low cost operations has helped the company to achieve the fastest break-even in just four years of operations. Uninor reported a 38% increase in revenue in the financial year ending December 2014. The telecom company’s strong business performance continued with 10.85 million new subscriptions being added across its six circles. This makes Uninor number four in customer market share in its circles of operation with nearly 11% of the subscribers. The company is also expected to start its operations in Assam by end of this year.

Also, Uninor reported a 38 per cent year on year improvement in gross revenue amid challenging operating environment in Q3 FY 2014. As a part of its third quarter result presentation (quarter ending September) in Oslo, Telenor Group reported sustained business growth of its operation in India.

The company’s strong business performance continued with 1.8 million new subscriptions being added in its six circles during the third quarter. The ARPU growth was driven by higher share of Internet users and improved quality of its subscriber base. Uninor has around 19 per cent subscribers accessing Internet services actively. Uninor’s Sabse Sasta strategy has enabled the firm to attract new subscribers.

Uninor is a pre-paid only operator and offers pre-paid products for the mass market at ‘Sabse Sasta’ or ‘lowest in the market’ tariffs. The company launched its “Internet for All” strategy together with its Sabse Sasta Facebook and Sabse Sasta Whatsapp products earlier this year.

The company has been aiming to provide convenience to its customers as top priority. With this growth trajectory and aim, Uninor was looking to increase its call centers’ operational performance.

Project Head

Avinash Mittal, CIO, Uninor

The Challenges

Avinash Mittal, CIO, Uninor said that though Uninor’s call centers were continuously striving for higher operational performance, it was quite challenging to serve a customer efficiently and enhance their experience.

“The challenges were coming from the complexity of the CRM product. An agent had to juggle across multiple screens resulting into high AHT (Average Handling Time). It had complex architecture, even changes and upgrades were taking too much time. The product life cycle management also needed to be simplified,” he said. There were a few other issues as well, like meeting the performance benchmarks, support on open source technology, arranging competencies from partner, and on-boarding key stakeholders.

The implementation

Taking cognizance of the operational challenges, Uninor launched a project in collaboration with the business team to sunset their existing commercial, CRM solution, completely and migrate to an in-house next generation CRM system called CIM – Customer Information Management with a target of achieving single-screen—360 deg customer view, user friendly GUI, reduced AHT (Average Handling Time), reduction of repeat callers, improving call quality-FTR (First Time Resolution), and IT savings (CAPEX + OPEX).

Since the CIM was developed alongside IT partner Wipro, the solution’s IPR is jointly owned. The product has been covered under ‘FLM-Full Lifecycle Management’ process, which ensures that it is maintained in releases and new features are added.

Uninor’s efficient operations and partnership model has been adopted by Telenor’s other business units (BUs) in Asia. For example, Telenor Myanmar is implementing the CIM in what would be effectively the world’s last green field telecom network roll out. Currently, the company is implementing CIM-Phase II, which has plug-ins and more features on waivers, CTI, e-mail management and broadcasting.

The IT team of Uninor faced a few challenges during the implementation of the project, such as, meeting the performance benchmarks, or to support on open source technology, and arranging competencies from partner. Infact, on-boarding key stakeholders during the deployment was also a challenge, as per the CIO.

The Result

The Average handle time (AHT) has already shown reduction by 4 seconds, and reduction in repeat callers has happened. Uninor marked several other benefits post deployment, like CAPEX avoidance plus OPEX Savings distributed over 3 years, AHT reduction by 5%, repeat caller reduction by 3%, and increase in call quality by 5%.