Customer Stories

Airtel Customer 360: "Digital brain" for personalized customer engagement in real time

Challenge
Solution
Benefits
Resources

The results

40K+

transactions per second

5 9's

reliability

90%

reduction in TCO

100B+

records processed per day

“We said we’re going to take all of these 350 million customers regardless of which line of business they belong to and create a single repository which will actually power what we call the digital brain of the company. It will also give us a complete 360 degree view of the customer.”

Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO and Head of Digital, Airtel

"From the very inception, we needed very resilient persistence to prevent data loss and realize 99.999% reliability," said Mehta. "Aerospike made some bespoke enhancements into the core product to allow that to happen and I believe this is something that we could have done only with probably a handful of companies in the world."

Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO and Head of Digital, Airtel

About the Company

Airtel is the world's fourth largest mobile network operator

Bharti Airtel Limited, also known as Airtel, has 440 million subscribers and operations in 18 countries across Asia and Africa. The company’s product offerings include 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services, mobile commerce, fixed line services, high speed home broadband, direct-to-home (DTH), and enterprise services including national and international long-distance services to carriers.

Airtel is also a trusted provider of information and communications technology (ICT) services, along with digital TV services. In addition to their telecom business, Airtel is also a successful bank, offering prepaid and postpaid phone services, online payment processing for utilities, and the ability to send money.

Challenge

Deliver better customized experiences and services

With 1.3 billion potential customers in India alone, competition for customers is fierce. To reduce churn, Airtel knew it needed to provide a better customer experience.

Leverage customer information

Better understand individual customers and their needs via a Customer 360 initiative.

Aggregate data

Collect and combine data sources from more channels to have a 360 degree view of multiple data sources including phone, messaging, emails, and voice.

Increase customer engagement

Prevent churn while increasing average revenue per user (ARPU).

Solution

Requirements met with Aerospike

Airtel selected Aerospike to help them overcome significant technical challenges.

Consolidate data at scale at speed

Could take data from 350 million customers and bring it into one database at 40,000 TPS with sub-millisecond performance.

Deeper insight

Mine trillions of records with deep learning to understand customer activity and answer deeper questions.

Personalized experience

Understand what their customers were doing, what they wanted, and how and when they wanted it.

Customer 360

Every system in the ecosystem could query the database to ask information about the customer.

Solution areas

Telecom Industry Solutions

Powering modern Telecommunications application data at petabyte scale, distributed, real-time data platform with > five 9's uptime for AI/ML, OSS/BSS, 5G, MEC and IoT

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Customer 360

Use big data customer profile data and historical data (CDR, CRM, call center, applications logs, and web click stream) with AI/ML at scale to predict customer needs, behaviors and to provide real time personalized relevant offers.

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Benefits

Benefits realized with Aerospike

Aerospike provided the ability to take data from 350 million customers across all channels and bring that into one database at a rate of more than 40,000 transactions per second with sub-millisecond performance to significantly improve reads and writes for the Airtel Digital Brain 360 solution.

90% TCO reduction

Moving from Oracle TimesTen to Aerospike resulted in a 90% reduction in total cost of ownership

Greater scalability

Airtel can process 100 billion+ records a day at a rate of 25K-40K transactions per second

Holistic customer view

Elimination of less siloed data allows Airtel to use historical data and real-time triggers to develop a better customer understanding

Resilient persistence

With bespoke enhancements, Aerospike enabled resilient persistence to prevent any data loss and realize 99.999% reliability

Additional resources

Video

Airtel & Aerospike accelerating the digital agenda featured slide

Summit 2022: Airtel and Aerospike accelerating the digital agenda

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