Rajan Swaroop
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
I feel very warm and welcome, not only
by the staff in my company, but also by
people outside. If you will allow me to
share my vision, you will understand
what it means. Airtel Nigeria seeks to be
loved my more customers, and to be the
most loved brand in the daily lives of
Nigerians.
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
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