Tackling the digital literacy challenge: Telenor India’s Customer Education Hubs

This blog has been co-authored by Ms. Claire Sibthorpe. 

Connected Women had the opportunity to speak to Mr Pushpendra Singh, Head of Retail at Telenor India, to learn about their Customer Education Hubs which are educating customers, including women, on how to use mobile phones and mobile internet.

Research shows that low mobile literacy and, related to that, self-confidence in using mobile phones as well as a lack of digital skills is preventing mobile phone and mobile internet use, particularly for women. Telenor India has seen in its stores that using mobile phones, to make calls or use the internet, is a challenge for their customers. Since internet and mobile data is new, many are not aware or are scared of it and are not sure of how they should use it and how much it will cost them.

To address this challenge, Telenor India decided to establish a number of their stores as customer education hubs and a place for customers to go to ask questions. This blog is based on an interview with Mr Singh who conceptualized this important initiative.

 

Telenor India’s Customer Education Hubs

Last year Telenor India started to convert some of their stores to customer education hubs (Grahak Shiksha Kendriyas or GSKs) to educate customers about mobile and mobile services. These hubs act as knowledge and awareness centres where existing and potential customers can walk in to get information related to Telenor India’s voice and internet services. These hubs also resolve queries related to the use of mobile phones. Anyone who visits a customer education hub can make the most of this training as long as they own an internet capable handset.

As part of this initiative, Telenor India has recruited customer relationship executives (CREs) to manage each education hub. All CREs are tested on their ability to provide service and educate customers. They must also attend monthly training courses to maintain the consistency and quality of customer training they provide. In some trial shops, quizzes are disseminated via Whatsapp on a weekly basis and prizes and incentives are frequently offered.

Every day the education hubs receive a list of voice only customers in the vicinity via the MIS database from HQ in Delhi. Staff at the hubs call these customers and invite them to a training session.

When a customer comes to one of the customer education hubs, the first step is to encourage customers to subscribe to a data plan. The Telenor app is then downloaded to enable the customer to become accustomed to topping-up via the app. Other apps are then downloaded to give the customer a chance to become comfortable with using internet on their handset. Staff ask customers a number of questions to identify their needs so that the education delivered meets these needs.

Mr Singh highlighted that customers are curious about what a smart phone can do and they want to learn about all the different apps. The most popular ones tend to be Whatsapp and Facebook. Often incentives such as two days free mobile internet package are offered on connection to give the customer a chance to ‘play’ with the apps.

 

A focus on women

To serve women customers and generate livelihood employment opportunities for women, Telenor India is recruiting female customer relationship executives (CREs). Telenor India has found that women in particular are more comfortable with female sales representatives and that female customers are often drawn to the hubs by their female customer relationship executives. The hubs are also successfully using special events such as International Women’s Day to draw more women to use mobile internet and women are increasingly learning about these hubs through word of mouth.

During a visit to a customer education hub, a female customer relationship executive reported that she has seen her monthly earnings rise from INR4000 to INR7000 including bonus. One of her KPI’s is to connect at least 3 customers to mobile internet every day. In addition to the daily calls she makes, she reports that there is a high footfall in the GSK and at present, the probability of customers with smartphones who do not know how to activate and use mobile internet is relatively high.

 

What are some of the insights we can learn

Mr Singh shared some valuable insights from their experience and highlighted that:

• The selection of the store to be converted to a customer education hub is important. For the pilot, Telenor India selected stores that were high performing and also based on their location and where there were lower levels of internet use. The pilot highlighted that it is important for the education hubs to be located in stores were there is support and they can add value.

• This initiative involved a change in the way that they ran their stores, from serving customers as retail outlets to educating them. When you have sales staff they have a sales-mentality and you need to re-train them. It was therefore important to change the mind-set of the staff working at the hubs. This involved reassessing the type of staff interfacing with the customer as well as recruiting new staff.

• It is important to incentivise staff by adding training KPI’s to their monthly targets. CREs currently have commercial targets linked to their monthly bonus. Observations have shown that in shops where there is a high footfall, training customers becomes less of a priority as CREs are motivated solely to meet their commercial targets.

• It is important to recognize that there are significant costs associated with customer education hubs and they are unlikely to be highly profitable. There are, for instance, training costs and higher costs to recruit suitably skilled individuals with no guarantee that customers who are trained will adopt the services or remain loyal Telenor India customers. Due to the higher costs and the risk on return on investment, it is important that these types of initiatives have senior level support and are driven from the top.

• Effective training of the staff at the education hubs is critical. It is important to thoroughly train those who are delivering the customer education and to ensure that the delivery of this training to customers is top of their mind. Telenor India are developing a web-based training tool to deliver the training to the store staff, to help ensure that the information given to the customers was the same across the board. It was also essential to have personalised training in the store environment.

• It is important to move step by step, ensure that learning is captured and corrections are made as the initiative is rolled out. Telenor India decided to first pilot this initiative with 100 stores and is now expanding it to 500 stores by the end of this year. When asked what they would do differently, Mr Singh shared that they should have kicked-off the pilot phase with fewer retail outlets before expanding to additional stores since the implementation of changes based on initial learnings took much longer in 100 shops. Telenor India has also decided to not market the customer education hubs too broadly until they have assessed that they are effectively and consistently delivering on their promises.

 

Initiatives such as these are important for improving digital literacy and realizing the significant commercial and socio-economic opportunity of increased adoption and use of mobile phones services. For their potential to be realized they must also ensure that they are reaching and meeting the needs of women, who continue to lag behind men in accessing mobile phones and mobile internet.

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