They may have been arch-rivals in the past, fighting tooth and nail to either keep their customer base intact or to enhance their revenue share. The daily wage earners had begun a large scale migration towards different pockets of the country after the lockdown brought their bread earning activity to a screeching halt. So the telcos came forward to ensure that, in the very least, their march back home was supported with telecom connectivity.
But with the country waging a proverbial war against COVID-19, leading private telcos – Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea - have stepped up to provide aid to their low-income customers.
Immediately after the lockdown was imposed, telcos created war rooms at strategically important locations and allocated senior engineers and support staff to respond to any disruption. Within a week into the lockdown, they had pitched a specific strategy to keep the phones of low-end customers ringing at remote locations.
In a country, where about 95 per cent of consumer telecom accounts are pre-paid, two leading telcos identified the customers at the bottom of their revenue pyramid (by mapping average revenue per user metrics on a monthly basis). This base was then provided with unrestricted incoming calls as well as the addition of Rs10 talk-time to their accounts. Bharti Airtel identified about 80 million such customers while for Vodafone, the number of beneficiaries worked out to around 100 million.
Shashwat Sharma, Chief Marketing Officer, Bharti Airtel commented, “In this difficult hour of fighting off the threat of COVID-19, Airtel is committed to ensuring that all people remain connected without any disruptions. And for this objective, it is critical to take care of the under-privileged daily wage earners of our country, whose lives have been disrupted due to the lockdown.”
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Serving the bottom of the pyramid. A file picture of the migration. Source: Pixabay