Mobile Sewa Kendra, a mobile-based app platform becomes a case study for customer service success in semi-rural & rural India
Akosha, the messaging platform for all consumer-to-business 
interactions, and Aircel, one of India’s leading innovative telecom players, have together created new milestones in the realm of customer satisfaction in the country. With the launch of the Aircel Mobile Sewa Kendra, a mobile app-based platform that has been deployed across 2,000 retailers in rural areas and through the use of smart application of Akosha OneDirect suite to manage online interactions, Aircel has been able to significantly enhance customer experience and satisfaction across geographies in a span of just eight months.
To achieve this, Aircel divided its subscriber base into three tiers, forming a pyramid. The upper two tiers represented premium customers, who have started to embrace social media to resolve issues while the third tier, one of the fastest growing segments, comprised customers from rural areas. The two-fold challenge accepted by Aircel was first, to ensure that the prime customer segment received superior customer service across all channels including social media and second, to deliver a stellar customer service experience to the rural and semi-urban subscriber base, despite logistical barriers such as lack of on-ground customer support in most of these places.
Akosha and Aircel formed a Joint Action Team to address these issues. To cater to the premium customer segment, Akosha provided the requisite infrastructure to Aircel in the form of Akosha OneDirect suite so that the organisation could listen to all its customers, through social media platforms, 24×7 and empower itself with actionable customer data to achieve the desired customer-centricity. It is a unique software tool that has been designed keeping in mind the specific challenges that Indian brands face in delivering the best possible customer experience. This technology connects every online interaction the customer has with a brand. OneDirect is the only platform that includes all of the capabilities to manage a holistic social media strategy; along with built-in integrations with traditional CRMs to leverage the power of social media.
On the other hand, to cater to the needs of the semi-urban and rural subscriber base, the Joint Action Team roped in neighbourhood corner shops and empowered the local retailers to help customers with their queries by simply using a smartphone. This led to the development of ‘Mobile Sewa Kendra’ -a mobile-based customer service app that became a game changer in this domain.
While catering to this e-rural segment, it was important to deploy a platform that would be user-friendly, available in local languages, and also which worked efficiently on a 2G connection. The app structure was therefore designed such that a query, request or a complaint could be addressed in just three simple steps. This air-tight query, and request and complaint capturing mechanism left no scope for a complaint to be lost in the loop. The deployment of this platform was met with a tremendous response and high levels of acceptance. As a result, retailers have wholeheartedly embraced this app to provide valuable feedback, leading Aircel to consolidate its market leadership position in terms of customer satisfaction.
Speaking on the initiative, Vishrut Chalsani, VP, Enterprise Solutions & Co-founder, Akosha said, “The rural subscribers of Aircel sought more personalised attention while the more net savvy customers from urban geographies demanded a quick and responsive social media management. Through an intelligent API integration of Akosha OneDirect with the Aircel internal CRM, we were able to achieve both goals. With the Mobile Sewa Kendra, Aircel and Akosha have been able to tremendously improve customer experience across segments such that our combined success has become a veritable case study for superb CRM, specific to the Indian context.”
Alok Kumar, Chief Service Delivery Officer, Aircel said, “A highly effective customer-centric organization has to be tuned to serve its market in the best possible way. An ‘internet savvy’ customer needs a responsive social media management, while a customer in semi urban/rural area needs a personalized ‘high touch’ handling at the front end. We are glad to have got Akosha as our ‘Customer Experience’ partner, who have brought in their technology offerings, combined with a young, energetic and enthusiastic team, who were willing to learn and innovate with us, to deploy creative solutions for serving both these segments.”
Aircel today manages its entire Online Reputation Management (ORM) operation from a single dashboard, where team members can easily respond to tickets and resolve them, without having to go back and forth over elaborate, complex protocols. In addition, Aircel’s Mobile Sewa Kendra won the Voice&Data- Telecom Leadership Award 2015 for Innovation in Customer Service.
