Airtel: Digital transformation of a sales journey

Digital transformation of a sales journey for enabling on-field sales team to sell digital connectivity products

Airtel PRI or Primary Rate Interface is an end-to-end digital communications connection that helps businesses connect with their customers efficiently.

Currently, the acquisition journey for the product is done manually on paper which required manual intervention at every step and is dependent on partners.

Understanding the challenge

In the proposed journey, we need an end-to-end automated journey, where all the manual intervention will be eliminated. The user at the customer location will fill in the complete details (including online feasibility, range reserve, plan selection, etc.) and complete the acquisition journey from their end. The order to installation TAT was 12–18 days using manual orders, the goal is to reduce that by 10–15%.

Strategic Fit

User Research

Personas

After discussing with the stakeholders involved, we further analyzed the research data and did user interviews with our targeted users to understand them further and the problems they face daily in the offline acquisition of the product.

We found out that we had two primary users:

1. Account Managers (AM): The account managers are employees of the company and their day-to-day responsibility is to manage customer accounts, sell them new products and services and help them if they face any issues with their products.
2. FSE (Field Sales Executives): The responsibility of an FSE is to sell the company’s product offerings by generating leads from businesses by cold calling them or visiting their offices.

Competitor Analysis

A competitor analysis was done to map out the various features offered by Airtel’s competitors.

User Stories

We got the user stories from the product manager and we had to fulfil every need of the product while keeping in mind the user’s needs as well.

1. The user should be able to get the leads from various sources and he should be able to create a new lead, edit existing leads, schedule customer meetings, discuss the requirement and capture the solicited product details.
2. The user can enter the installation address for checking network feasibility.
3. Users can select Standard Plan or Customize Plan basis customer requirements.
4. The user can reserve the customer's choice of pilot number.
5. The user can do digital eKYC for customers as per regulatory requirements.

User Flows

Next, we created user journey flows to ideate and understand what the user’s flow on the journey would be. We discussed the same with the PM and other stakeholders to be in sync with the business requirements and product construct.

A snapshot of the user flow diagram

The solution

To solve this complex structure of selling, I segregated actions into small action buckets.

Designed the solution in a way that it had 4 easy steps to place an order for our sales executives.

This would allow them only to focus on customer inputs for what they want for their business and fulfill it without any paperwork whatsoever.

Step 1: Plan Selection

Step 2: Number Reservation

Step 3: DOA Approval (required only in case of custom pricing)

Step 4: Billing Summary

Usability Testing

The usability testing for the product was done using Maze and a documentation was created for the same.

Out of 38 out of 46 participants for the usability testing able to complete the journey with an average time of 2 minutes and 21 seconds.

A few inputs were taken from the questions asked after user testing which are as follows:

1. Users were unable to understand a few abbreviations for product terms. Ux copy was updated in the design shipped.
2. Users were unable to choose a pilot number in the initial design, which was later updated from their inputs.
3. 2 users were not able to understand a few terms for which tooltips were added to eliminate the learning curve for new on-field sales employees.

Impact

• Decreased lead to installation TAT to 3 days from 12–18 days earlier.
• Enabled on-field executes to increase productivity by reducing the time taken to log an order by 50%.
• Increase in 12% orders for PRI products within 5 months of release.
• The same journey was used as a skeleton for selling other products.
• Helped new customers be onboarded by sales executives digitally through digital transformation of this journey.