India’s premier digital communications solutions provider Bharti Airtel has built a customer engagement engine Customer 360 along with Aerospike Inc, the real-time data platform management company to understand customers and deliver personalised experiences.
With the Customer 360, also known as the "digital brain", the telco said it could drive a one-channel experience for customers, irrespective of the services they are using, be it the call centres, Aitel app, stores, or digital television.
Airtel’s engineering manager Vibhu Gupta said in a developer event that the firm could now finally have a unified and holistic view of each customer after implementing the Aerospike database.
“We could use historical data along with real-time triggers to develop a better customer understanding,” he said.
Moreover, Airtel could view over 600 static and derived attributes of customers, and successfully integrated more than 300 customer-facing applications. It could also view approximately 500 million records loaded in Aerospike within 20 minutes.
Airtel handles over 440 million subscribers and operations in 18 countries across Asia and Africa delivering a wide range of services including 3G, 4G and 5G wireless services, mobile commerce, fixed line services, broadband, direct-to-home (DTH), and enterprise services. It also operates a digital payments bank that offers prepaid and postpaid phone services, online payment processing for utilities, and toll tags as the ability to send money.
The company required a unified, integrated platform to combine various business channels and leverage data analytics to communicate effectively. It planned to upgrade to an accessible, responsive architecture with high scalability and speed.
Besides data mining capabilities, we also needed a very dynamic way to store and process 100 billion-plus records a day at a rate of 25K-40K transactions per second, Gupta explained.
Use cases
Airtel’s customer 360 has been embedded in the customer data layer that provides cohort-level context on various demographic and behavioural attributes.
“It aggregates 600+ customer attributes, continuously recorded since the first day a customer is onboarded to Airtel’s network,” Gupta said. Further with data and AI capabilities, we collate near-real-time data to map out the customer’s journey.
The other use cases with Aerospike for Airtel include reducing low response times for its DLT platform, Thanks App that caches customer information and the payments bank that could ‘easily’ integrate with Aerospike enterprise data platform.
Aerospike is also used in other processes like Airtel’s MINT which keeps record of recharge history and rules for customer offers, Airtel IQ which holds the customer’s complete call journey and Groundhog which deals with network complaints.
The Airtel Thanks app, is a no coded application where every single piece of text or image is completely ‘unique’ and updated in real-time to offer a personalised experience to customers, he added.
Going forward, Gupta said Airtel aims to explore more internal on-server upgrades with Aeropsike and also bring out new features for customers.
