| Accelerating Digital - 07/04/2020 |
| Airtel |
| TELECOM/ICT Operators and Service Providers | Asia & Pacific | India |
| One of the biggest issues Airtel needed to solve for, was to enable consumers to recharge their telecom plans during the lock-down. Telecom is an essential service and people need to recharge. As long as they know where to and how to. Before lock-down, only about 35% of Airtel consumers were recharging digitally on a regular basis. Remaining 65% consumers were still dependent on retailers, most of which were now shut. To solve for this, Airtel accelerated its digital trajectory and moved from 35% online to 70% online in a span of ten days. Airtel followed a three pronged approach. 1) First, get digital savvy customers to recharge online – task here was focused on driving awareness, partnering with third party platforms. 2) Second was to target the consumers who use telecom data (and thus are online), but not recharging online. For this consumer set, Airtel focused on educating them to pay online. Super simple journeys were created with training videos published in vernacular. 3) Finally, there is a large population that is using Feature phone and is not even online. To address this set, a new program was launched to incentivize users to recharge for others. Idea was to create a community of micro entrepreneurs, who will recharge for others and earn 4% margin as an incentive. To scale this program, Airtel partnered with companies that had a fleet of gig economy workers like drivers/ delivery partners (e.g. Uber). In context of the lock-down, this enabled an alternate source of income for these workers, while Airtel accelerated digital recharges. In addition, in India, there are millions of migrant workers and daily wage earners who have been impacted due to the nation-wide lock-down. To support them and to make sure that they remain connected in the current time of crisis, Airtel has extended validity for over 80 million under-privileged customers. All these customers will continue to get incoming calls on their Airtel mobile numbers even after the validity of their plan is exhausted. Airtel has also credited talk-time in their accounts to enable them to make critical calls or send SMS and therefore stay connected with their loved ones. With this initiative, Airtel customers will also have unrestricted access to vital information from local authorities to help combat COVID-19. |