One Airtel, One customer: Our CLM journey for 350M+ customers
In this digital age, customers are now ever-engaging and demand a superior experience, tailored to their liking. Communication plays a pivotal role in shaping this experience, and we at Airtel, are constantly rethinking our approach to deliver a rich and relevant experience to all our customers. Industry trends validate that >70% consumers expect personalized interactions and get frustrated when the company is unable to do so. Further, it can be concluded that their need for personalized experience can directly impact revenue and growth by ~40%. Driven by the desire to offer optimized communication, we revisited our customer lifecycle management (CLM) system with a focus on personalization.
Point of departure
Until 2020, customer-centric communication channels were siloed which resulted in disconnected customer context. At our scale, this meant 5 businesses with their respective marketing and customer experience teams, connecting with 350M+ customers across 1000+ campaigns each month. On several occasions, customers received multiple messages in a day with limited relevance and interest. This needed to change.
Our next-gen CLM platform was envisioned as a unified, integrated platform to bridge the disconnect between channels and leverage the power of data analytics to communicate effectively. Catering to 350M+ customers, it enables more than 1B personalized messages each day across various communication channels such as SMS, Email, OBD, App Notifications, and WhatsApp.
Taking a closer look at Airtel’s CLM
The NextGen CLM brings together complex systems and functionalities with aim to deliver a simple output — the right message, for the right customer, at the right time. It is founded on pillars of a comprehensive customer 360, governance engine, personalisation centre, and experimentation & reporting platform.
Airtel’s customer 360 was embedded as an all-inclusive customer data layer which provides cohort-level context on various demographic and behavioral attributes. It aggregates 600+ customer attributes, continuously recorded since a customer is onboarded to Airtel’s network. As a result, we are consistently refining our understanding of customers and enriching it with the most recent customer view. Leveraging the power of data science and AI, detailed segmentation and cohorting is performed on this data. Further, a library of moments collates near-real time data to map out a customer’s current journey with Airtel which adds value to these cohorts.
A governance engine operates as an autonomous tool to monitor, audit and control all communication while maintaining its’ reliability. It ensures compliance to different rules and criteria so that the overall customer interaction, combined across channels and campaigns, is optimized. For example, customers with DND preferences shouldn’t receive communication, there should be a limit on # messages per cohort per campaign, etc.
The personalization center operates like an intelligence layer, working in conjunction with the customer data layer and governance engine. It provides insight on the most relevant messages for a given customer based on their prior interactions and preferences. For example, our CLM is equipped to suggest recommendations in vernacular, which goes deep into an individual’s preferences and tailors the communication language to their language. In India, we are home to immense regional diversity, and this capability has been highly impactful and offers exceptional personalization for our customers.
While we were making concerted efforts to provide an enhanced customer experience, there was a felt need to reinvent how we track our effectiveness and perform continuous improvement. The reporting and experimentation (R&E) framework was designed to enable ‘one-click reporting’ of all active marketing campaigns. As a result, the marketing managers have an easy way of measuring, and analyzing campaigns. Further, an on the fly approach enables faster iterations and experimentation which significantly improves the impact of their marketing efforts.
Impact of the CLM revamp
Two years since inception, our CLM has evolved as a multi-faceted communication powerhouse that supports several real-time use cases on a daily basis. Prioritizing customer convenience, users are alerted about network downtime or scheduled maintenance/outages in real-time. With the dawn of the work-from-home era, this capability has proved immensely valuable as customers are consistently updated about resolution time and are informed beforehand.
Taking it a notch higher, the our CLM has transitioned to an omni-channel system and is also integrated with our field force. Field service agents can now run hyper-local campaigns and send communication to customers in a given locality about service camps, site maintenance, etc. Leveraging the power of analytics, we can now personalize each customer’s journey and create opportunities for cross-selling the right products, for e.g. recommendations for data pack upgrades.
What is our plan ahead
Going forward, we aim to enrich all communication on the back of real-time contextualization, wherein we will reach out to the customer basis events — user triggered (for e.g. cart abandonment) or system triggered (for e.g. payment failure). Another key improvisation will be a preference center which will store both, implicit and explicit customer preferences on language, preferred channel etc. Furthermore, we will add journey-based/drip campaigns with adaptive experimentation to enable dynamic scaling for business users. As we move towards an omni-channel world, our focus is on ensuring a consistent experience while keeping all communication relevant and personalized for each customer.
