Airtel’s Journey Towards Proactive Service Assurance
A Case Study: Transforming Service Assurance for a Better Customer Experience
The Challenge of Traditional Service Assurance
In the world of service assurance, the status quo has always been reactive. In a network-centric world, customers often find themselves reporting service disruptions, and Network Operations Centers (NOCs) and Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) react to these issues after the fact. This fragmented approach leads to delays in fault detection and resolution, ultimately impacting the customer experience.
The result? Longer resolution times, poor customer satisfaction, and the lowest NPS scores of all industries. Airtel, one of the world’s largest telecom providers, knew that the future had to be different. They needed a solution that would allow them to move from reactive to proactive service assurance, where issues were identified before the customer even noticed.
The Turning Point: Airtel’s Vision for a Proactive Service Assurance
Airtel recognized the need to modernize their NOC and CSR centers. With a diverse range of customers and technologies across multiple regions, they sought a solution that would unify their approach and provide faster, more accurate detection of customer issues. Their goal was to deliver an unmatched customer experience by identifying faults quickly and resolving them even before customers were impacted.
However, they faced a major challenge: their existing systems were siloed. Multiple disconnected tools (18-20 systems) were used across different network layers, each tailored to specific functions, making cross-domain fault resolution difficult.
Despite significant investment in customization and complex alarm rule sets, Airtel couldn’t achieve the proactive approach they envisioned.
The Solution: Partnership with Accenture and TierOne
That’s when Airtel turned to TierOne and Accenture. Together, they delivered a proactive, customer-centric Service Assurance platform that went live in the fall of 2023. The goal was simple: enhance service assurance by shifting to a proactive, intelligent platform that automatically detects and addresses faults across Airtel’s complex hybrid network.
Key components of the solution included:
- Real-time customer service impact across all network domains and multi-vendor environment
- A single pane of glass view for fault resolution
- Automated troubleshooting and proactive notifications
- A common, unified customer, service and network data model
- Federated, real-time standardized network data across both legacy and next-generation networks and vendors
- Enabled Airtel’s NOC and CSR teams to understand all customers impacted by network failures in real-time across all domains.
- Automated troubleshooting and data collection to isolate the faults automatically through a process engine.
- Utilized automated workflows to remediate issues across any technology and vendor.
“We have built a strong partnership with TierOne that would allow us to accelerate our digital journey and progressively deliver quality of customer experience while adding new capabilities to reduce time taken to handle faults, enabling proactive resolution of service disruptions and automated resolution across network domains.”
The Transformation: Achieving Real-Time, Proactive Service Assurance
By implementing the Service Assurance platform, Accenture and TierOne helped Airtel achieve a monumental shift in service assurance:
- Faster fault identification: Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) was reduced from hours to under 10 minutes.
- Improved fault resolution: A 40% reduction in Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) minimized disruptions.
- Streamlined SLA Management: Fully automated service uptime calculations has muted disputes and improved customer perception significantly.
- Cost Optimization: Automation and AI-driven processes optimized Airtel’s internal operations, allowing teams to focus on higher-value tasks while leaving routine fault management to the system.
The results were clear:
True customer satisfaction!
Unified data access for technicians and CSRs that the business can rely on!