Airtel Postpaid Digital Transformation

Bharti Airtel, one of the world’s leading telecommunications providers, operates at massive scale—serving over 574 million customers across 17 countries and supporting a vast enterprise and government client base. In such a high-volume, data-intensive environment, ensuring seamless customer lifecycle management and operational efficiency is critical to maintaining service excellence and competitive advantage. 

As part of its digital transformation journey, Airtel adopted Oracle Siebel CRM to streamline customer operations. However, increasing system customizations—particularly frontend-heavy implementations—led to significant performance bottlenecks, inefficient processing, and delays in critical workflows. 

At the same time, the complexity of handling service requests across multiple interconnected systems introduced data inconsistencies and synchronization challenges. Disparate updates across billing, reporting, and operational systems resulted in fragmented information, impacting decision-making and user experience. 

Additionally, managing large-scale B2B processes—such as bulk customer onboarding and data handling—proved cumbersome due to manual interventions, data validation issues, and system limitations. These challenges created an urgent need for a more robust, scalable, and performance-optimized CRM ecosystem capable of supporting Airtel’s growing operational demands.

Performance Issues in Airtel’s Siebel CRM Transition: Airtel’s adoption of Siebel CRM, with frontend-centric customization against Oracle’s advice, has led to severe performance challenges. Excessive server trips from frontend logic implementation have resulted in inefficient processes and slow system performance, hindering effective CRM utilization and business operations.

• Data Inconsistencies Arising from Service Request Handling: Airtel's system encountered data inconsistencies across multiple platforms due to incomplete updates and disparate information handling in service requests (SRs). Instances of incomplete SRs led to violations of open SR checks upon subsequent logins. Furthermore, alterations made in one system, such as billing or reporting, failed to reflect in others, resulting in discrepancies in the information available to users.
• Challenges in Bulk B2B Process Management: Difficulties in efficiently managing bulk B2B processes, especially in registering multiple contact details. Clients submitted customer details in CSV files, resulting in errors and discrepancies during data entry.

• Strategic CRM Roadmap: Cubastion developed a strategic roadmap, defining CRM goals and supported processes to address data fragmentation issues.
• Efficient Service Request Management: Information was stored in the database only upon completion of tasks, preventing the premature commitment of incomplete SRs to the database. Multiple tasks were created for different systems involved in processing service requests, such as billing, network, reporting, and Optimus. Updates from these tasks were synchronized with the UI, and only when all tasks were completed was the service request closed.
• Enhancing Performance through Backend Migration: Transferring the custom code from the frontend to the backend, ensuring that UI-related components remained in place. By rebuilding the customizations on the backend, the processes were optimized, leading to enhanced performance.

• Enhanced User Experience: Users no longer encountered discrepancies in information as updates were reflected uniformly across the UI after completion of associated tasks.
• Enhanced Data Accuracy: Robust validation processes minimized errors and discrepancies in bulk registrations, ensuring accurate customer data entry.
• Compliance with Best Practices: Aligning with Oracle recommendations ensured a more sustainable and scalable CRM environment for Airtel.