Vodafone has restructured the way it monitors and tracks the health, status and efficiency of its overall network in India, as it looks to edge out rival Bharti Airtel in the profitability-hit and yet potentially lucrative telecom industry.
The telecom major has created what it calls a ‘super network operations centre’ (SNOC) here, which consolidates and replaces the company’s regional network operations centres.
Referred to as the ‘nerve centre’ of Vodafone’s operations, the SNOC, which was built up over the last two years and has already started functioning, helps the company proactively measure and improve customer experience and service quality.
According to company executives, there has been a 46 per cent reduction in data customer complaints versus last year, and an overall 38 per cent reduction in mean time to restore [service/issues] for key regions, mainly due to the new centre.
“We had roughly 22 different NOCs around the country, which worked on the resource-end. They were highly fragmented in that they had different skills and sometimes used different software… some of it being outdated. So, we shut them down and brought in the people to re-skill them for the SNOC. We also hired some new people,” Vishant Vora, Director-Technology, told this correspondent on Wednesday.
“The previous NOCs would tell us something had failed, whether it was a base station or our e-top up platform. What it would not tell us how much of an impact this had on our customers and services. That’s what our SNOC seeks to do…by allowing us to proactively address complaints and decrease turnaround times,” he added. What the SNOC does in effect is combine both the IT and network layers, allowing Vodafone to see where a customer’s problem is taking place.
According to Mr. Vora, customers can now expect better reliability and quicker resolution of any service issues.
The company is also expecting its enterprise services — voice and data solutions for corporates — to help boost its overall business here in the country. (The correspondent was in Pune at the invitation of the company)
