Mahindra Comviva wins Global Telecoms Business Award for Airtel Africa Managed Services
London, UK, May 28, 2014: Global Telecoms Business awarded Mahindra Comviva, the global leader in mobility solutions and Bharti Airtel, for innovation in Business for Managed VAS Services. Airtel is a leading telecommunications services provider with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa and the fourth largest global operator in terms of subscribers. The awards were announced at the eighth edition of Global Telecom Business Innovation Summit 2014, held in London recently.
Mobile VAS services are a crucial growth determinant for Airtel Africa, contributing between 15% and 20% to revenues. Upscale and rapid investments in VAS services have, however, spawned a fragmented services ecosystem and created a massive system sprawl, which brings added operational and management complexity. Managed VAS Services represents a business model wherein Mahindra Comviva assumes the mantle of a single point of responsibility of managing the service provider’s complete VAS services portfolio across 17 operating companies.
In the last five years, Mahindra Comviva’s end to end VAS Services capability has yielded positive business outcomes. The biggest impact has been on quality of service. By bringing services under a single SLA and monitoring performance end to end, 90% faults are detected before a service is impacted, resulting in a more satisfied and loyal customer base. Other benefits include 60% improvement in turnaround time, 15% reduction in data-center costs due to infrastructure optimization and increased services delivery efficiency by 90%.
Anurag Srivastava, Head of Managed VAS Services, Mahindra Comviva, said, “In a challenging VAS services environment MNOs want a service provider they can trust, one who has the proven capability to deliver real business outcomes. Our managed services model is underpinned by the breadth of capability, flexibility and scale, deeply experienced workforce and the largest and most diversified group of VAS services professionals in the world. The award is a validation of our expertise in the VAS services domain and proven execution, management and implementation capabilities on a large-scale.”
Andre Beyers, Chief Marketing Officer, Airtel Africa, said, “Airtel is acknowledged as a leader in innovative business practices. With intensifying competition, pressures on time to market, proliferation of services and growing complexity of VAS services, managing VAS in-house is not ideal. Customers benefit from improved quality of service. Partners benefit from improvement in turnaround time for service launch and higher adoption due to increased service delivery efficiency. Reductions from infrastructure optimization have also reduced data center costs.”
By working with Mahindra Comviva, Airtel benefits from implementation of uniform policies for performance level requirements and definition of processes to facilitate seamless management which guarantees an optimal customer service experience. The instrumentation of seamless services delivery also involves service design, re-engineering VAS topology, managing capacity and driving VAS revenues.
A pioneer in the Managed VAS Services space, Mahindra Comviva is managing business operations for over 150 VAS services for over 35 operators globally.
The GTB Innovation Awards are designed to honor innovative projects involving telecom operators and service providers around the world, working in association with their vendors and suppliers.
