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Airtel Business leverages Xtelify’s IQ to increase its profit margins by 20%

  • Date Icon January 21, 2025
  • Time Icon4 min read

Overview

Telecom companies are facing increasing pressure to innovate and adapt to the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Traditional business models centered around legacy communication channels are becoming obsolete. Vanilla voice and messaging capabilities are growing, at a very slow pace of 8% and 16% annually and will only decline. On the other hand, the CPaaS value chain is experiencing a significant boom. Valued at $23 billion and growing at a CAGR of 28%, the cloud communication market is particularly strong in voice (38% growth) and messaging (98% growth).

While telcos have been major providers of standardized messaging & voice offerings, for them to fully realise their potential, it is imperative leverage platform-based innovation, offering a wider range of software based advanced communication services facilitating innovation, and managing communication for enterprises, reducing the dependency on aggregators.

The Challenges for Telcos

  • Restrained Growth: By limiting their offerings to SMS and voice, telcos risk becoming obsolete. Software aggregators, continually innovating on their platforms, will capitalize on this opportunity, leaving telcos to struggle with declining margins.
  • Technical Expertise Gap: Building an efficient communication platform requires deep expertise in areas like API design, micro-services architecture, real-time communication protocols, and cloud technologies.
  • Time-to-Market Pressure: The communication market is highly competitive, with new features and services emerging constantly. Without agile methods of development and rapid development cycles, which telcos often struggle with, they may lose to aggregators with robust capabilities.
  • Scalability and Reliability Challenges: Building and maintaining a scalable, secure, and highly available platform requires significant investment in infrastructure and operational expertise.
  • Complex Partner Ecosystem and Integration: Communication platforms need to integrate with a variety of third-party services, and communication channels. Cultivating and maintaining a robust partner ecosystem necessitates strong relationship-building skills, effective collaboration, and a deep understanding of each partner’s unique needs and goals and intrinsic technical capabilities.

Airtel Business, like other telcos, primarily offered traditional communication services that were becoming increasingly commoditized, limiting its value proposition. This led to competitive disadvantages as specialized aggregators gained market share with innovative solutions and higher margins, reduced customer engagement due to transactional interactions, and stagnant revenue streams as voice and SMS revenues declined.

The Solution

Airtel Business partnered with Xtelify to transition from a traditional SMS and voice aggregator to a provider of advanced, software-based, end to end communication solutions. Thus, creating Airtel IQ, the world’s first network enabled communication platform.

This strategic move aimed to create a comprehensive communication suite, empowering businesses with innovative tools to enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency.

  • Airtel Business leveraged Xtelify’s IQ and used its unique features to solidify its position as a communication solution provider for every business need.
  • Airtel Business strengthened its foundational channels (voice & sms) by incorporating the software layer and incorporated Xtelify’s unique features, namely Omni-channel orchestration, Hyper personalized engagement & Network APIs to create a suite of solutions that merged the telco’s core offering with advanced capabilities.

“Xtelify has been the cornerstone of our success and helped in building a world-class programmable communication suite. Xtelify’s IQ platform has enabled us to not just solve real customer pain points, but also create additional revenue streams for Airtel Business.”

– Sharat Sinha- CEO, Airtel Business

Multi-channel campaign manager

Real time insights & detailed analytics

Customisable call flow builder

Impact

The partnership between Airtel Business and Xtelify yielded remarkable results:

Metric Before Xtelify With Xtelify
In Country RMS 10% 40%
Profit Margins Few Increased by 20%
Customer Engagement & Control The end customer control lied with aggregators, leaving them with a higher RMS The end customer engaged directly with Airtel Business, therefore building a direct connect, leading to higher RMS & margins with enterprise sales
Capabilities Limited base features to solve for very few customer communication needs An additional layer of advanced features like intelligent call routing, multi- campaign manager, analytics & insights, among 20+ specifications to solve for diverse customer communication requirements

With Xtelify’s IQ, Airtel Business was able to:

  • Accelerate Time-to-Market: Launch new communication products and services, reducing time-to-market and gaining a competitive edge.
  • Strengthen Market Position: Gain a competitive edge over traditional telecom providers, expand its market presence and attract new customers by creating a new product category
  • Diversify Revenue Streams: Airtel Business was able to diversify its revenue streams and reduce reliance on traditional voice and data services, thereby future proofing the business and expanding the margin profile.

Conclusion

Airtel Business, through its strategic partnership with Xtelify, has successfully transformed into a leading communication solutions provider. By integrating Xtelify’s advanced communication platform, Airtel has strengthened its market position and is well-positioned for future growth in the dynamic communication landscape.