Proactive Customer Service

This happened to me recently. I was out of country for more than a month, and stopped using my phone number local to India. When I did get back to my life at Bangalore, Airtel customer service called me to inquire why my usage of their service has reduced and whether they can help with any issues with the service. This is an example of providing proactive customer service. (It is another matter that I did not have any complaints and did not get to test their commitment to resolve any problems raised during call.)

This scenario is also a good example of what can be achieved by the combination of the customer focus and simpler use of technology. Identification of potential dissatisfied customers is a challenge but finding such patterns do not require sophisticated analytical tools all the time. There is always some pertinent data that is lying unused in some corner of the IT system. All it takes is good business people who “see” how the data can be put to use, building IT component is the easier part. In the above case my usage falls under a range (say 50 calls/week), and the system was able to identify customers who deviated from the “normal” usage. When you see this deviation hitting a limit, it is time for the system to create some outbound call activities for the personnel to pickup and run. Of course, you could use “sophisticated analytics” to establish what exactly is the deviation where you should start worrying about the customer 🙂

The end result? Although however insignificant this may be and even with my understanding of how mechanical the system works underneath, I am pleased that Airtel does value my business.