LastNovember, Idea Cellular ran a campaign called ‘NoIdea; Get Idea’ with its brand ambassador AbhishekBachchan urging fellow mobile subscribers to subscribeto Idea rather than wait endlessly for another telecomoperator’s contact centre to respond to their service

query or to bring down their monthly mobile bill, among oth-er things. Major telcos ran similar campaigns around that time.The government’s Mobile Number Portability (MNP) schemewas imminent then, and Indian telcos were worried it wouldeat into their already-thin margins besides adding to the costof losing valuable customers.

Almost six months after MNP was implemented, NavanitNarayan, chief service delivery Officer of Idea Cellular, anAditya Birla group company, is breathing easy. While the me-dia campaign played its part in creating awareness, he believesit’s Idea’s quality of service that did the trick, and helped hiscompany create stickiness.

Culling out numbers from the Telecom Regulatory Au-thority of India data, he points out that as on June 15 this year,around 8.5 million users shifted loyalties from their respec-tive services providers. Idea Cellular’s losses were the least –if port in to port out – or PO/PI – ratio is anything to go by. ThePO/PI ratio is arrived at by dividing the number of users thatjoined a particular telco by the number of users that shiftedloyalty. Going by this calculation, Idea seems to have done bet-ter than other operators.

Here are the actual figures. For every 100 customer portingin, Idea loses 57 customers, No. 2 operator (Vodafone) loses 66customers and No. 3 (Airtel) loses 71 customers. Players like

Reliance Communications (RCom), Tata Teleservices and BSNLhave been the main losers in the MNP game.

“Idea retains the No. 1 position in this space with a com-fortable net gain lead of 47,359 over number two operator and100,264 over the number three operator (data as on June 19).We continue to lead the MNP race in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka,Mumbai, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharash-tra,” says Narayan. He adds, “The idea of MNP was to give usersmultiple choice. We started the exercise two-and-a-half yearsback, putting the network infrastructure in place. Given thelow post-paid base, this was a challenge. We knew it was notgoing to be a game changer since pre-paid users are low ARPU(average revenue per user) ones. So we looked at other factors.You can’t just reduce the cost and expect customers to stickaround. Hence, we wanted to focus on improving the qualityof network and our service levels.”

Alok Shende, principal analyst of Ascentius Consulting,acknowledges that “Idea has been very proactive in their mis-sion to endear customers”. But he qualifies that their successin MNP is not a necessary outcome of this approach. Much ofthe churn has been taking place at the low-end of the ladder.And MNP was devised to address customer dissatisfaction.So the fallout was predictable, he reasons, cautioning that “thereal battle for MNP is yet to begin”. Srishti Anand, IT & Tele-com analyst from Angel Broking, concurs that MNP has itsown dynamics, regardless of the efforts of telcos.

Friendly user interface Idea Cellular is now the third-largest mobile services operator

in India in revenue terms, and recorded a subscriber base ofover 93.75 million as of May 31, 2011. It became a pan-Indiaintegrated GSM operator in 2009-10. To achieve “a customer-focused enterprise”, this February Idea Cellular invested in acustomer relationship management (CRM) application fromOracle (Siebel CRM 8.0). The application, Crystal, “has em-powered all customer-facing agents to take better decisionswhile serving customers,” says Narayan.

The implementation was outsourced to IBM (similar to Air-tel). Wave-I (comprising the Prepaid Customer Service mod-ule) of the CRM Transformation has been implemented. It hasbeen rolled out across 20 of the 22 Idea Circles, in a phasedmanner ensuring effective change management and seamlesshandholding. Consequently, Idea’s customers can get theirqueries addressed from any part of the country regardless ofwhere they subscribed from.

Globally, it is the largest single instance packaged CRM inthe wireless category servicing over 70 million subscribers(very soon to touch 100 million). “Idea is the first Indian oper-ator to implement packaged CRM for the prepaid market, whichconstitutes around 95 per cent of the Indian telecom market.Crystal records over 150 million customer transactions everymonth,” claims Narayan.

Idea Cellular simultaneously envisaged a hub and spokemodel. The contact centres in the metros can be likened to thehubs. For instance, the company has a large contact centre inIndore for its Hindi language users. But a user in Chattisgarh

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1 General Motors took the oil-soaked booms from the BPGulf oil spill and recycled theones made of polypropylene tomake the air baffles for its newChevy Volt cars

2 Goldman Sachs

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4 Apple Computers’ call fordesigners resulted in The SnowWhite design language,developed by HartmutEsslinger of Frog Design

5 Rajiv Bajaj, MD of Bajaj Auto

6 German Coffee chain Tchibo

7 Hon Lik of Ruyan GroupHoldings invented the world’sfirst electronic cigarette.His

company was earlier called theGolden Dragon group.

8 The FBI (Federal Bureau ofInvestigation) was establishedin 1908 by US AttorneyGeneral Charles Bonaparte

9 Triple Bottom Line was coinedin 1994 by John Elkington,founder of the UK-basedconsultancy SutainAbility. It wasa measure of the profit, peopleand planet. People and planetdenote a company’sresponsibility towards thesociety and the environment.

10 NBC started using thePeacock from 1956 torepresent its increase in colourTV programming

1 Which company unveiled its‘Sound Charge’ t-shirt thatharnesses the power of soundto charge a cell phone usinga material found in hi-fispeakers?

2 In the 80s, the founder CEOof which Fortune top 10company did a hula (a Hawaiiandance) on Wall Street after hiscompany made a pre-taxprofit of 8 per cent for theprevious fiscal year?

3 To revamp the image of achocolate brand in a particularcountry, the national flag onthe wrapper was replacedwith the US flag since theconsumers preferred Americancandies.Name this brandwhosecampaign recently wonan international award.

4 The actor who played the co-founder of Napster andFacebook in the movie SocialNetwork, recently bought asocial media propertyreportedly worth $35million.Name him and the companyhe invested in.

5 Which consumer productscompany recently announcedthat its vice-president ofcanine communications willretire after 56 dog years ofloyal service?

6 Pronounced as either “ack-soy” or “ack-swa”, it’s thelatest concept used as a metricfor evaluating onlinebusinesses. What is the term?

7 Who said: “I am not at allembarrassed that we areopening up a new multi-billion dollar industry that isfocused on fun”?

8 In 1910, the Humber MotorCompany exhibited itsproducts at the Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition inthe United Provinces of India. The members of the companyparticipated in a fund-raisingfor a student hostel inAllahabad. What is thehistorical significance of this gesture?

9 Which former brand usedthe slogan, “Forever BikeForever Value”?

10 State the connectionbetween the two logos belowand also mention the namegiven to the second logo.

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THE STRATEGIST QUIZ 209

The Social Network is a film about the founding of Facebook

Sarmistha Neogy

Acouple of months back, confectionerymaker Cadbury India entered the ̀ 12,000crore biscuit market with the launch of

Oreo sandwich cookies from the global port-folio of its parent Kraft Foods. Oreo is the sec-ond product after orange drink Tang from theKraft stable available in India.

Cadbury sees great potential in biscuits,the fastest growing processed food segmentin India. According to a Nielsen study, the cat-egory grew at 17 per cent in 2010; but the percapita consumption remains low, indicatinga big opportunity to grow.

Post launch Oreo’s global ‘Twist, Lick,Dunk’ (TLD) communication broke acrossmedia — including television, print, radio,below-the-line and digital. “Our televisioncampaign aims to highlight the bonding mo-ments between a father and child, as they in-dulge in child-like delight while eating anOreo and performing the ‘Twist Lick Dunk’

routine,” says Chandramouli Venkatesan, di-rector, snacking & strategy, Cadbury India.

Oreo has used the TLD proposition in itscommunication in over 107 markets for near-ly a hundred years. Says Venkatesan, “We wantour brand to encourage fathers and mothersto spend quality time with their children.”Oreo’s maiden television campaign in Indiabroke during the ICC World Cup 2011 to grabmaximum eyeballs.

Oreo also had ahard-to-miss out-door campaignwhere the Oreo bis-cuit packets weremounted on bus shelters. A mobile van alsocarried the TLD communication forward;there was a large fabricated glass of milk ona van and the biscuit could be seen movingup and down as though it was being dippedinto the glass of milk.

Oreo started the second part of its cam-paign in India recently by introducing the con-cept of the Oreo Togetherness Bus. Startingfrom New Delhi on June 8, 2011, the blue Oreobus travelled across eight other cities — Mum-bai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Pune, Lucknow,Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mysore. People got

to know of the arrival of the Oreo bus in theirrespective cities through hoardings, ads inthe city supplements of newspapers andthrough FM radio.

“The bus provided parents with a platformto bond with their children and encouraged

them to spend more time with their kids. Thisinitiative by Oreo germinated from a surveyconducted by Cadbury, Oreo TogethernessQuotient, which showed that parents todaycrave for a little more time with their children,away from their hectic work schedules. Oreodecided to bridge the gap with its Oreo bus.

Inside the bus, parents and theirchildren were encouraged to par-ticipate in activities based on Oreo’sTLD proposition. Parents were al-so encouraged to take the Oreo

Pledge —a promise to spend more time withtheir children.

Interface Communications is handling themass media and digital aspects of the cam-paign, and Candid Marketing is the support-ing the brand’s on-ground initiatives.

POWER MOVES

Cadbury India

Bonding over biscuits

OREO STARTED THE SECOND PART OF ITS CAMPAIGN IN INDIARECENTLY BY INTRODUCING THE OREO TOGETHERNESS BUS

To become the most favoured operator in the MNP stakes, Ideahas worked hard to spruce up its network and quality of service Leslie D’Monte

BETTER CONNECTION

TOP GAINERS032010 Operators PORT

Operator Port Port Net PO/PI in out ratio

Idea 1,693,351 978,781 714,570 0.58

Vodafone 1,984,310 1,297,940 686,370 0.65

Airtel 2,123,670 1,490,988 632,682 0.70

T-GSM 727,232 624,179 103,053 0.86

Aircel 517,037 440,610 76,427 0.85

TOP LOSERS032010 Operators PORT

Operator Port Port Net PO/PIin out ratio

R-GSM 338,354 1,019,415 -681,061 3.01

BSNL 318,982 877,699 -558,717 2.75

R-CDMA 28,780 506,578 -477,798 17.60

T-CDMA 26,414 410,901 -384,487 15.56

Datacom 20,637 74,788 -54,151 3.62

� In the fifth month of launch, eight million customers haveopted for MNP service so far.

� Idea continues to be No. 1, with a net gain lead of 28,200over No. 2 operator and 81,888 over No. 3.

� Idea continues to maintain lead on net gains in five circles:Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Mumbai, Madhya Pradesh andAndhra Pradesh.

� On Port Out to Port In ratio, Idea continues to performbetter than all other operators, that is, for every 100customer porting in, Idea loses 58 customers, No. 2operator loses 65 customers & No. 3 loses 70 customers .

� Top circles where MNP is getting higher response acrossoperators (that is, number of telecom subscribers whohave opted for this service) are as below.

Circle Porting subscribers

Gujarat 795,895

Rajasthan 673,394

Karnataka 588,801

Andhra Pradesh 563,039

Madhya Pradesh 544,378

� Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Mumbai, Karnataka andAndhra Pradesh are lead net gainers in their respectivecircle across operators.

HIGHEST GAINING CIRCLES032010 Circle Port in Port out NetMaharashtra 194,493 93,417 101,076

Tamil Nadu 100,323 8,167 92,156

Madhya Pradesh 166,551 76,055 90,496

Karnataka 149,799 62,874 86,925

Andhra Pradesh 121,280 55,194 66,086

MNP: THE BIG SWITCH (June 15, 2011)

“YOU CAN’T JUST REDUCETHE COST AND EXPECTCUSTOMERS TO STICKAROUND. HENCE, WE

FOCUSED ON IMPROVINGTHE QUALITY OF NETWORKAND OUR SERVICE LEVELS”

NAVANIT NARAYANChief service delivery officer,

Idea Cellular