How Vi reimagined digital care during a 2x surge in social interactions during the pandemic

Vi, India's leading telecom provider, provides pan India voice and data services. With a large portfolio to support the growing demand for data and voice, the company is committed to delivering delightful customer experiences and contribute toward creating a truly "Digital India" by enabling millions of citizens to connect and build a better tomorrow.

Vi is developing infrastructure to introduce newer and smarter technologies, making both retail and enterprise customers future ready with innovative offerings, conveniently accessible through an ecosystem of digital channels as well as extensive on-ground presence. The company is listed on National Stock Exchange (NSE) and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) in India.

“We want to provide seamless voice and data connectivity with world-class customer experience. This puts us in an extremely competitive environment,” says Ashish Sharma, EVP, Customer Services at Vi. “In the last two years, we’ve seen an almost three-fold increase in social media mentions, largely due to the digital boom because of increased data penetration across India,” says Sharma. When coupled with the pandemic, which resulted in more people relying on digital technology for communication, these factors lead to an exponential increase in user mentions.

To maintain the best possible customer experience, Vi needed a solution to:

• Engage and connect with customers across different social media communication channels
• Prioritize its customer-care workflow by attending to urgent cases first
• Bring together complex processes and business partners across the organization for more streamlined operations
• Manage a large volume of customer data and feedback on a single, unified platform

As a customer-oriented organization, Vi places a major focus on customer experience. With millions of customers, keeping track of every person who reaches out to the customer care team is not an easy task. With more than half a million tags coming through traditional customer service channels like call centers, email, stores, and another 4k–6k interactions coming from social media channels daily, some cases can easily fall through the cracks.

Prioritizing the customer care workflow

With the large number of comments and inquiries that pour in daily, the care team at Vi needs to be strategic in its customer service approach.

Before the pandemic, having a stable and fast at-home internet connection was not as critical since most people worked from offices. That changed when COVID-19 made work from home the default. Combined with the sudden surge in internet access across India, it was inevitable that more people would need troubleshooting assistance.

Due to the sheer volume, it was impossible to address every customer’s comment immediately, so the care team needed a platform that would help them monitor and engage with key stakeholders like enterprise customers and VIPs to resolve their concerns first. Sprinklr Service is equipped with leading AI models that can monitor specific sentiments and filter out the most important, urgent requests from those that are non-engageable, enabling employees to prioritize and take swift action on pressing issues.

Having eyes and ears on the ground, regardless of platform

As every social channel is used for different purposes, not all are made to be great customer care platforms. For example, professional social networks may be great at fostering business connections, but they may not be optimized for customer service. It can also be difficult to manually monitor mentions of the brand on the platform without a third-party tool. Messages can be easily missed, and this could be detrimental to the brand if complaints or negative comments are not picked up and addressed.

Sprinklr has enabled the Vi care team to quickly identify and address customers’ concerns before issues escalate.

To more accurately measure the success of these interventions, Sharma shares that the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has increased by 500% in just six months for social media interactions.

Attending to customers quicker and more efficiently

Before Sprinklr, Vi did not have a way to accurately measure its customer care response time and categorize the different types of cases. “In the past, we could only track the average response time, and we realized we needed deeper monitoring and quicker response time. Being able to slice the information we have with Sprinklr has given us the data needed to better understand the types of queries we commonly get, the speed of specific responses based on their categorization, and as a result, we can more efficiently allocate our resources,” says Sharma.

When it comes to customer care, standardized responses are also critical, particularly when dealing with hundreds of agents that come and go. With Sprinklr’s AI technology, Vi has the ability to respond more efficiently to priority customers.

Setting up automated solutions with Sprinklr Service has resulted in 30% improvement in time saved, as automated responses can be set up for simpler customer journeys to optimize resources. “Using automated filtration to extract relevant cases and then responses for queries that can be solved with straightforward answers helps us not only respond faster to actual posts, but also boost our resource optimization,” Sharma explains.