About Excitel:
Launched in 2015, Excitel is a leading broadband provider in India. Currently, powering over one million homes, Excitel is among the country’s top three service providers by subscriber base. With its singular focus on delivering a world-class broadband experience marked by speed, continuity, and coverage, Excitel serves more than 50 cities through a network of 2,400 partners across the country.
Excitel is a quality-driven organization committed to delivering optimal customer experience (CX) by leveraging the best available resources. To this end, It prioritizes investments in advanced tools and the latest technologies, delivering exceptional end-user experiences at affordable costs.
Situation:
When the pandemic struck in 2020, demand for broadband internet services rose rapidly and exponentially. The lockdown and the stay-at-home mandate restricted mobility, forcing the world to shift online. As business, services, and daily life went digital, Excitel came under increasing pressure to meet the demand for Internet services. Excitel’s subscriber base grew by 55% to reach half a million subscribers.1 With the burgeoning subscriber base and mounting pressure on its support infrastructure, Excitel needed to continue to meet and exceed customer expectations of uninterrupted broadband internet services, which it was known for, even through difficult times.
The challenge was to not only service the user base but also to meet the increased demand for greater speed, wider bandwidth, and expanding coverage amidst increased usage and a highly competitive landscape. The bandwidth requirement, the number of users, and devices concurrently in use peaked in every home. Among the many reasons were:
- Employees working from home were dependent on seamless connectivity to collaborate and work. Video-conferencing services like Zoom saw a ten-fold increase in usage
- Students relying on virtual classes and using high bandwidth-consuming video conferencing
- Increased use of data-consuming gaming and streaming entertainment services
- Higher use of video calling as people sought to connect and communicate digitally
- Rise in online shopping, food deliveries, and Q-commerce sites
- Increase in online doctor consultations, news, and media updates
Pain points:
While broadband consumption levels were already rising, the pandemic and its aftermath saw exponential growth in usage. Under normal circumstances, Excitel managed its service delivery and issue resolutions through a call center. For more complex issues, they dispatched an executive to the customer site.
Retaining the same course of action became increasingly challenging with the following:
- Restrictions around the free movement of people
- Reduced team of call center staff and services
- Diminished availability of executives to visit customer premises
- Marked rise in the volume of customer issues with the surge in customer base
- Lower level of patience for disruptions and downtime
The situation demanded an innovative solution. Excitel had to continue meeting the high standards it had set for performance and service continuity as a broadband service provider. In fact, the pressure was now greater due to consumers’ greater dependency on broadband internet services to support their daily activities.
Solution:
After assessing Excitel’s pain points, Aprecomm recommended its Virtual Wireless Expert (VWE) product. Using the cloud, the VWE solution was seamlessly downloaded onto all of Excitel’s Wi-Fi access points, including gateways and routers, across its 500,000 subscriber base. The upgrade was executed successfully without service disruption and, importantly, without deploying field engineers, which would have contravened social protocols to prevent the spread of the pandemic. Using sophisticated AI algorithms, Excitel could now monitor, flag, and heal network performance issues remotely and much faster than its existing systems that relied on human intervention.
Success:
After deployment, Excitel observed the following:
- A granular view into device performance: By using Aprecomm’s unique algorithm and performance metrics to measure the quality of experience, Excitel could now see the performance of every CPE and its connected client devices.
- Real-time monitoring and remote management. Through a single dashboard, Excitel’s customer support representatives could remotely and proactively monitor, evaluate, and identify potential issues and provide suggestions for fast resolution, preventing customer calls.
- Smart and intuitive distributed intelligence platform. Excitel could capture and record data and recognize anomalies using machine learning capabilities. As an AI-based system, VWE continuously learns and updates performance benchmarks.
- Self-healing, agentic AI. Through VWE, Excitel could now make autonomous decisions, such as proactive resource rebalancing, dynamic traffic rerouting, or automatic fault isolations, to solve problems that might have led to unnecessary support calls and truck rolls.
Benefits: Excitel reported the following after deploying VWE:
- Enhanced CX: Subscribers reported an improved connectivity experience
- Fewer disruptions: Fewer instances of disruptions and network downtime through proactive self-healing or through flags sent to CSR reps to take action and recommend resolutions
- Better connectivity: The self-healing capabilities reduced the number of complaints and ensured continuous internet services with a reduction in support calls and truck rolls
- Improved reliability: Lower latency and packet loss, as well as enhanced continuity, improved the quality of service.
Business impact:
- 35% improvement in first-call resolution
- 30% reduction in support call duration
- 62% reduction in truck rolls
- 15% reduction in support staff
- Boom in new subscriber acquisitions post-pandemic thanks to an increased reputation for quality of experience and service reliability.
Excitel has continued to grow and has now surpassed 1 million subscribers. It consistently provides exceptional customer experiences, all powered by Aprecomm’s highly scalable AI solution.
Quote:
“Aprecomm’s solution has helped us to transform our approach to customer support, giving us visibility into customers’ Wi-Fi networks so that we can understand the issues they face.”
“We have much more control over the quality of experience we provide, and the time we take to resolve customer queries has been reduced massively.”
“It has been a successful journey together. When we started working with Aprecomm, we had less than half a million subscribers, and today, we have surpassed one million. I look forward to reaching 10 million users and beyond.”
Vivek Raina, CEO of Excitel
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