Airtel

Challenge

Airtel has a large customer base for their prepaid mobility stack, with customers relying on the ability to add funds to their phone in order to make calls or access interactive services. Several years of rapid growth were straining their benefit provisioning system, to the degree that when customers requested a customized benefit, it took tens of minutes for them to receive what they’d paid for.

The problem was the result of a file-based provisioning system. A new file was created at a predetermined interval, preprocessed by a mediation system, and then recharge information was extracted to offer provisioning to eligible customers. Delays throughout this system were adding up, which was frustrating customers and forcing call centers and retailers to respond to a large volume of customer support calls about services that were already being provisioned.

Airtel evaluated a number of other messaging technologies from leading vendors, but found that they did not cost-effectively provide the capacity with necessary headroom to accommodate both provisioning and other use cases, and were susceptible to stability and performance problems. Airtel selected Solace for its ability to meet the needs of their provisioning use case while providing headroom and additional functionality with which they could solve other problems as well.

Solution

Airtel successfully deployed their Solace message routers into production just months after purchase, thanks to a simple architecture that makes Solace technology very easy to deploy and manage.

Benefits

With Solace now passing recharge information to the benefit posting system, 97% of customers receive their benefits (customized additional minutes or data) within seconds. This has improved customer satisfaction and reduced the number of calls from frustrated customers, which has freed up retailers to focus on sales and call center reps to provide faster response to real support request.

Future

Airtel has defined Solace as their enterprise-wide recommended messaging technology for all use cases that involve the efficient distribution of business-critical, high-volume or time-sensitive information, and have already defined projects in areas such as 4G enablement and national mobile number portability.