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Airtel unlocks mobile growth with Xtelify’s Data Engine – achieves highest industry ARPU of 90%

  • Date Icon January 20, 2025
  • Time Icon4 min read

Overview

In today’s hyper-competitive mobile landscape, operators like Airtel need to constantly innovate to retain existing customers and attract new ones. This case study explores how Airtel, India’s leading telecom provider, partnered with Xtelify to leverage a powerful Data Engine (DE) to achieve significant growth in its mobile subscriber base. By harnessing the power of rich telco data and network intelligence, DE helped Airtel obtain granular customer insights to personalize its offerings and drive targeted mobile growth strategies.

The Challenge

India boasts one of the world’s fastest-growing mobile markets, with over a billion subscribers. However, this rapid growth also translates into fierce competition. Airtel, with a substantial existing customer base, faced the challenge of not only retaining these users but also attracting new ones in a market saturated with choices.

Airtel needed a solution that addressed the following key challenges:

  • Poor customer experience leading to high churn: Field teams lack real-time network data, hindering proactive maintenance and swift issue resolution thereby hampering customer experience. Field teams further rely on individual excel spreadsheets, leading to data inconsistency and lag hindering decision-making ultimately leading to high churn.
  • Manual Data Reconciliation: The absence of digital and real-time tracked KPIs leads to manual fleet management which makes performance monitoring and improvement. Network data from fleets responsible for maintaining infrastructure is manually recorded and not centralized, creating data silos
  • Lack of customer intelligence – Incomplete customer profile and dated insights limits the ability to cross-sell and upsell
  • No visibility of competitor actions – No mechanism to ingest competitor strategies for tactful evaluation and accordingly modifying our strategies for customer acquisition.

Airtel needed a robust solution to solve this predicament in front of them.

The Solution: Xtelify’s Data Engine

Xtelify’s Data Engine (DE) emerged as the solution to Airtel’s mobile growth challenges. The DE is a powerful platform – a mobile + web based solution specially designed to support and empower our front line teams. The true power of Xtelify’s DE lies in its ability to provide actionable insights at a granular level. Airtel’s decision to deploy a network divided into micro-markets was a crucial factor in this success. This granular approach allowed them to:

  • Understand your market better by a grid level view: Extracting actionable insights across all functions by dividing the country into 100m X 100m grid for granular actions. This enabled them to prioritize network improvement initiatives and ensure optimal network performance for customers in each location.
  • One view of the customer: DE’s ability to integrate data sources allowed Airtel to create customized customer profiles based on multiple factors within each micro-market. This deeper understanding of their customer base enabled them to tailor their offerings and marketing messages to resonate with specific segments.

DE leveraged rich data from the below sources and integrated them:

Customer data:
Handset type, usage patterns, demographics, etc.		 Network data:
Cell tower performance, signal strength, network usage patterns in specific locations.		 Fleet Hierarchy data:
Data uploaded by different members.

The DE not only provided valuable insights but also empowered Airtel’s to take decisive action. The platform’s
intuitive interface allowed them to unlock:

  • Moment based targeting: DE leveraged rich telco data available with Airtel to create triggers. These triggers get activated in case there’s any update on customer front like – high data usage or data plan expiry or customer movement, etc. allowing them to leverage these moments and target these segments with personalized offers.
  • Recommend relevant solutions: With a comprehensive understanding of individual customer needs and preferences, Airtel leveraged DE’s ability to analyze customer behavior patterns enabled sales representatives to recommend data plans and value-added services

Granular Targeting – Web view

Mobile view for front line teams

By bringing together this diverse data set, the DE creates a holistic view of each customer and their mobile experience within a specific micro-market. Airtel, by leveraging Xtelify’s Country split into 100m X 100m micro markets, was able to achieve a level of customer granularity that was previously unimaginable.

The implementation of Xtelify’s DE yielded significant results for Airtel, propelling them to achieve industry-leading mobile growth:

  • Industry-Beating ARPU with Fastest Growth: DE’s data-driven insights allowed Airtel to personalize data plans and recommend relevant upsell and cross-sell offers to each customer. This resulted in a significant increase in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), surpassing industry benchmarks and achieving the fastest growth rate among competitors.