RAJAN SWAROOP, the soft-spoken chief executive officer of Airtel Nigeria, a leading telecommunications operator exudes confidence about the fortunes of his network. Though the network itself is 10 years old, its current business managers, Bharti Airtel is just 15 months in Nigeria.
In the interview below, Mr Swaroop speaks of the warmth of the Nigerian environment despite its many challenges and disclosed that his management has been working steadily to close gaps in business infrastructure which came about as a result of the successive changes in management ownership. At the end of this exercise, he said his company would have added two thousand more base stations by March next year, which would largely address the problem of network quality and availability. Excerpts:
0802 is 10 years old as a network, but Bharti Airtel as business managers have been here 15 months. What has been your experience in terms of operating in the Nigerian environment?
RAJAN SWAROOP
When we use that word loved, it means a lot to us. I think we intend striving to do things professionally. Here, every customer is very important to us and for every customer executor, every sales person, every person in finance, in the back office has to continue to think: How can I be loved more by my customers?
I am sure we all make mistakes, but 90 percent of the time we have always tried not to make mistakes in things that will make us successful, to keep our vision alive, and I think Nigeria has responded positively to us.
In terms of coverage, what has been Airtel’s experience in the last 15 months? Have you made any headway in terms of growing customer base?
There are two parts of the question, one is pertaining to the network and the customers. We have invested quite a lot in the network, obviously, in the past the company changed many hands, and there’s been areas which have experienced gaps in investments.
So, we have not only come to fill those gaps, but we have also been expanding our network, which means that the network quality, availability, and service is certainly improving I’m sure you will bear with me that in these 15 months if you have been using Airtel lines you will find the service is been improved.
Second question, pertaining to our customer base, we have improved in our customers number as well; they are staying with us, they are using the service more. Now it’s a question of saying whether it has actually been excellent or has been very good or has been good, but I would like to say very good is what our experience has been, in terms of our aspirations of customer base.
You talked about Nigerians loving your company and improvement in your service, relating this to your customer service, and getting more subscribers to your base. With regards to series of complaint on your customer relationship management, what is your company doing to correct the anomaly bedeviling your customer service?
Well, we have increased our services from the call centres. Before now, we had 100 staff, but today, we have about 2,200 agents that have been employed at the call centres. So efforts on that has been made, but we have seen that traffic has only grown more to our call centres.
We noticed that people call and keep talking or keep holding on for a long time, blocking other customers from being able to get access to the call centres. I have proposed to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for telecoms companies to make some sort of charges on people who make call to the call centre, talking for long.
There are various ways of doing it and we have suggested a few to the NCC and they are considering it, because our intention is to improve service, particularly to people who actually suffer it, not people who just want to chat, and just want to talk about something.
This is a wireless technology, problems may occur sometimes, calls will drop sometimes, but people should not keep on and on spending time on the call centre, obstructing other people who wants to use the centre, but I’m still surprised that some customers still face such problem (s).
Still talking about customer service, in the long term, good customer service is going to come from network expansion and building of more base stations and all that. What are your plans in this area.?
We have plans to build 2,000 base stations by March 31st, 2012. It commenced from October 2010, that means in 18 months we would be putting down 2,000 base stations to take care of the gaps that have been in the network. Just like I was telling you, first, is to sort out the gaps in our business infrastructure, that will also help decongest the network, and also enhance the coverage area. So customer experience is going to improve.
I think we must have done more than 700 towers, we should be able to do the rest, everything is in the pipe line. Don’t forget it takes a long time here to acquire sites for towers.
About infrastructure, a lot has been said about the operators walking together to ensure that the Eco-system is such that the customers actually benefit having a kind of infrastructure base that is very strong; That is talking about Co-location.?
When we started our journey, we first went to other operators and asked how often can we use their sites for co-location, so what we got from them, we have already deployed. So, we are maximising the use of co-location.
What challenges as operators work together on this?
There are some technical challenges and there are some operational challenges.
For the past three or four years we have been talking about the issue of number portability, Ghana beat us to it, are we almost there?
I think we are almost there. When we came here we spoke about number portability, but the regulator felt they should do Know Your Customer (KYC) first, and after that, do the number portability. And we told the regulator that may be right if they do the main thing, then those people who have already done KYC can be allowed to do number portability. NCC said that is the way they could go. So now once the platform is finalised it will take eight months for the implementation.
Looking at your Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, before now, can you let us into some of the activities carried out and why?
Our CSR is focused on providing education for the under privileged and we have converted that into our Adopt-A-School programme. We adopted a school in Ajegunle; it’s a primary school with 200 pupils, the school was totally dilapidated and we re-constructed the entire school.
Today there are six classrooms there and we have good drinking water facilities, we have good toilets, we have donated books, bags, and training for teachers. It’s not going to be done once, it’s going to be a continuous process. We treat that to be totally a CSR initiative. It’s got no element of advertising whatsoever.
What are your peculiar challenges in the area of power with regards to business infrastructure?
Power is a big problems for us. we have spoken to all the 11 power distribution companies and we have started getting our sites connected, but availability of power is low, only three, four hours a day.
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