Our role has changed from being a telco to a tech-co: Abhijit Kishore

Abhijit Kishore is the Chief Enterprise Business Officer at Vodafone Idea, the third-largest mobile network in India. As head of Enterprise Business Services, he recounts how the pandemic has transformed the connectivity needs of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) in India.

EnterpriseStory: What has this pandemic meant for your business, given that MSMEs have been deeply impacted?

Abhijit Kishore: Before the pandemic, adapting digital was basically a choice for customers. That has changed to customers adopting digital. It has become an imperative, whether you are a large or small organisation. And we cut across all organisations, whether it is an MNC, a large Indian organisation or an SME. That has been one clear shift in the past 12 months. 

The other thing is because of the nature of the lockdown, a lot of people have moved to Work From Home (WFH), which has two different connotations. First, if employees in Bangalore move to WFH environments in Bangalore. And second, employees in Bangalore who have moved back to their hometowns for WFH.

For larger organisations, they want to enable WFH with security as an imperative. That's another large shift we are seeing. 

The third shift we see is on bandwidth, both upgrades and downgrades, depending on customer needs. We see huge demand for hyperscalers, going up into hundreds of gigs. We also see some customers who had procured large bandwidth now looking for a downgrade because the workload has dispersed. So, it's a mix.

Finally, there is a SOHO (single office/home office) segment or prosumer, which is a professional consumer segment. How they reach out to their customers has become a challenge in the past 12 months. For them, the way to generate leads and do transactions is now digital-only. 

How has Vodafone Idea addressed these segments over the past year?

From our point of view, connectivity has moved to being a collaborative tool. In that context, our role has changed from being a telco to becoming a tech-co. While we are not moving away from connectivity, we are looking beyond it.

In the past 12 months, the digitalisation we have undertaken is immense from the kind of products we have launched, the processes we have changed, to how a Vodafone Idea partner is digitally enabled to approach an enterprise customer.

We wanted to get into this phase, and the past year has forced both the customer and us as an organisation to carry out fast-paced changes.

What are the opportunities Vodafone Idea is seeing in the MSME segment?

MSMEs form the bedrock of our economy, and digital is the single-largest enabler for them to flourish. But their biggest challenge is how they will connect with their customers? That’s one opportunity—to help them get digitally enabled—to reach out to their customers.

Number two is helping MSMEs with connectivity solutions that help them cut costs, increase their efficiency and productivity. The third opportunity is for the mid-tier—organisations enabling WFH. We have customised solutions for these use cases.

We are also a partner in TechSaksham, with the MSME ministry and the Confederation of Indian Industry, to digitally reach all our customers and talk about how we enable their business.

How has Vodafone Idea Business Services evolved in the past 15 years?

We understand the customers and their architecture. It's been a relationship to help them build that infrastructure that they are riding their network on today.

We are now moving to all kinds of services, be it mobility, fixed line, cloud telephony, IoT (Internet of Things), and security. The growth levers are IoT business, and Infrastructure as a Service. That’s where we are differentiating ourselves.

Are you looking to invest in technology or growing it through partnerships?

We are looking at differentiated partnerships, both with technology partners as well as solution partners. Vodafone Idea is a leader in the IoT space.

In the Indian market, one of the large IoT segments is connected cars. We have 85 or 90 percent of that market. But IoT is more than connectivity. It is about modules, devices, sensors and platforms.

We are now getting into providing this end to end. But, we don’t have all these skills inhouse, which is where partnerships come. In the integrated IoT space, we already have more than 25 partners.

In 2019, Vodafone Idea Business Services created the first industry council for Automotive. How has it grown?

There were around 15 CIOs and CTOs from different organisations. We picked the auto sector because the connected car ecosystem was developing. Two, the Automotive Industry Standard 140 has called for an Intelligent Transportation System in India. This spawns a huge opportunity in the commercial vehicles industry in India.

Now, we are looking at how to help companies in automotive or insurance do usage-based insurance premium. So, based on the driving speed and health of the tyres, can we decide what's the insurance premium a vehicle-owner has to pay?

As Chief Enterprise Business Officer, how did you navigate the past year?

The role entails a spectrum of interests. I had to look at some of the future initiatives while talking to a customer. Right after, the meeting would be a collection call, which went into outstandings. The next call would be on the churn that is high, and then a review with the Managing Director.

So, the spectrum is pretty wide. One critical thing is the bandwidth that one has to balance all the needs of the role because the second group doesn’t know what happened in the first meeting. So, the emotion of that can’t be carried to the next meeting.

It is a fine balance between efficiency and emotion, both critical faculties for leaders.

How has the sales team’s interactions with prospective new clients changed?

It has changed significantly in the past one year: 100 percent of the conversations now happen digitally, either over a phone or video call. Large accounts don’t mind this change in interactions.

The significant change has happened for the SME segment, where sales interactions involved a physical visit to the location in almost 100 percent of the cases.

The customers weren’t expecting a video call earlier because we worked with a channel partner ecosystem. In the past few months, we have had a programme called Saksham, where we are enabling the partner and their workforce to be digitally-enabled to connect with customers.

We generate leads digitally. So for the SME channel, from mindset to actual practicality, we have made a 100% shift to be in touch with the customers. And we need to be in touch with them because every single minute is an opportunity.

If they need bandwidth today, I can't keep them waiting for three months for my team to get in touch with them. Hence, that has become very critical. It also gives us an opportunity to ensure productivity, efficiency and cost savings when we are digitally in touch with customers.

That is great because productivity has been a big challenge in India. 

I'll give you an example. When we wanted to increase facetime with customers, one of my colleagues came up with the idea of a Customers Connect Day. We kept a target of meeting 2,000 to 3,000 customers.

We were surprised—by the end of the day, we averaged 10 customers across the entire customer-facing organisation, and clocked 7,000 connects on a single day in eight or nine hours. This led to more than 1,000 opportunities, apart from feedback. It was incredible.

Earlier, a Customer Connect Day involved physically visiting a customer and meeting the customer, but we would have met around 2,000 customers. So the change now is 2X-3X.