Indian telecommunication company Atria Convergence Technologies (ACT) has been its digital transformation journey for the past four years. This has helped them stay competitive during the pandemic, says Hara Prasad Kar, CIO at ACT.
The core issue was the intensely manual process: When a new customer comes onboard, a sales executive visits the customer’s place to check if they have fiber cables available in the area. The sales executive then visits the customer’s house to collect the necessary documents to complete the KYC [know-your-customer] process. They take pictures of the documents, then send the pictures to the back-end team, which processes the information.
Present in 19 cities with more than 2 million customers, this process was getting too overwhelming for ACT. “The turnaround time was extremely high. Visibility was absent from a management perspective. Interdepartmental coordination lacked, and this subsequently increased the manual work,” Kar says.
So ACT decided to make the process more digital and less siloed, via a cross-functional effort. “The business team, IT team, and sales team brainstormed together. During these sessions, we discussed ways to avoid manual process,” Kar recalls.