Bharti Airtel’s managing director Gopal Vittal is driving his people to not lose connection with customers, figuratively speaking. The telco’s boss has urged its about 19,000, including senior executives, across India, to cancel all business meetings on Tuesday and spend the entire day with customers on the ground. The big idea: get a proper handle on the service challenges customers face.
Vittal sent a letter to all employees, which ET has seen and reported on. “These interactions will help us understand customer needs on a deeper level. Tomorrow (March 12) is also an opportunity for you to discover first-hand what challenges our frontline staff face and how they serve customers,” Vittal wrote in the internal email communication.
Citing an anonymous executive, the report states the exercise is part of a national brand-building drive to position Airtel as a customer-obsessed telco that is keen on eliciting direct market feedback from its target audience on the state of its 2G, 4G and 5G mobile operations as well as home broadband services.
Ariel is readying for the national launch of its 5G services by the end of March.
In his letter, Vittal urges Airtel managers “to actively listen” to customers as well as the company’s staff on the frontline. Executives and employees are to share observations internally through an online form on the same day.
Bharti Airtel on February 5, 2024, reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 2,442.2 crore for the October-December quarter, growing 54 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Its revenue came in at Rs 38,339 crore, up 6.3 percent from Rs 36,062 crore in the year-ago period, Bharti Airtel said in an exchange filing.
The company’s mobile average revenue per user per month (ARPU) was at Rs 208 – better than estimates – and up nearly 8 percent against Rs 193 in the same quarter last year. The ARPU was driven by a “consistent strategy of acquiring high-value customers and improved realisations.
Airtel currently has 65 million 5G users across the country. Vittal said that 25 percent of the total smartphones in the industry will be 5G-enabled by March 2025.
“5G has become really about free data today in India. Free data on 5G is a headwind on any sort of monetisation as far as 5G is concerned,” Vittal had said, at the time. He added that there is no real 5G monetisation on the consumer business side.