airtel services evaluation - brand personality and recommendations

1. Services are now at the heart of everything that is marketed and customer and employee
loyalty are at the heart of all service breakthroughs (Heskett, 1990). We live in the post-
industrialization era, which rely more on the services and less on the industries. It contributes
higher than agriculture and manufacturing industry as a percentage of GDP in the world
(WorldBank, 2015). In middle and high-income countries share of the services industry
dominates even when agriculture and industrial outputs are combined. This paradigm shift in
economy in the past few decades explains consumer demand for services in various fields
that includes hotel and tourism, health care, food, retail, information technology,
telecommunications, entertainment, legal, consulting and many other areas. Services
marketing, the need for concepts evolved in the academic literature since 1977 (Shostack,
1977). This has led to the development of many dimensions and perspectives that focused on
intangible resources, relationships and value co-creation (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) ranging
from integrative view of products and services to pure service dominant view of marketing.
Broadly, Services can be classified into four categories as per Lovelock (1983). They are
either directed at people’s bodies or minds or tangible possessions or intangible assets. Unlike
products, nature of services is that production and consumption are simultaneous processes
for the organization and the consumer. Service dominant logic can offer the solutions through
intangible offering and can gain the competitive advantage through clear differentiation and
positioning strategies which might be less easy with the physical products alone. In fact, more
the dominance of services then more the complexity in terms of consistency,
communications, quality, ownership, supply-demand synchronization, pricing and
reproducibility (i.e., intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability and perishability). This
complexity deems some additional variables (in addition to 4P’s: Product, Place, Promotion
and Price) to be incorporated in the marketing philosophy namely people, physical evidence
and process for services. All these elements along with traditional marketing mix elements
will be explored in detail for a telecommunication company “AirTel” which is serving
millions of customers everyday.

2. 1
Bharti AirTel Limited, an Indian MNC that has its presence felt in 20 countries is ranked 5th
telecommunication service operator in the world (AirTel, 2014). Founded in 1995, the vision
of the brand “AirTel” is to become the most loved brand by 2015. The company is known for
pioneering its unique business model minutes factory to build its 1.85bn customer base
worldwide profitably laying the road for many of its competitors to follow its core
competency model. Although the company is an international one and offers multi-platform
services in telecom, enterprise and digital TV, the focus here will be on telecommunication
services in India. Telecommunication services can be regarded as merely service dominant
along the Services continuum scale (Shostack, 1977). We examine how AirTel conveys its
brand positioning and personality using Service branding model proposed by Berry (2000)
and analyse how the brand differentiates its services to its target audience throgh its
communications and operations activities. Various models like service blueprint,
SERVQUAL attributes and gaps model have been used appropriately in evaluating the
services and whereever necessary, recommendations for improving the brand positioning are
also suggested alongside the discussion with relevance to the academic literature.
Brand Positioning and Personality – AirTel:
Brand personality assigns consumers meaning in which they can relate and effectively
increase brand awareness and popularity. As described by Aaker (1996), brand personality
builds the emotional relationship between the consumer and the brand and is very important
in differentiating services (Zeithaml, 1981). The brand lends its appeal to the target audience
through recognition (Malhotra, 1988; Sirgy, 1982) and helps to build trust and loyalty
amongst them. As proposed by Berry (2000), the components and relationships of the service
brand are the presented brand, brand awareness, external brand communications, brand
meaning and customer experience as illustrated in the figure 1. Dotted lines show the
secondary impact and the solid lines shows the main impact on the dimensions shown in the
figure.

3. 2
Figure 1. Berry’s (2000) Service branding model
The logo of the brand has been redesigned in 2010 (EconomicTimes, 2010) to appeal to the
target global younger consumers. The changed dark red background color is designed to
refresh the brand to assign younger, energetic associations and to signify the heritage on a
global level. It also indicate the core values of the brand like leadership, performance,
dynamism and enthusiasm as this color has got resemblance with global recognizable brands
like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s for example. The white color is the recognition for humility.
The curved letter “a” is called the wave and highlights warm dynamic and friendly appeal of
the brand repositioned to become the most lovable brand by 2015. The current tagline that the
brand employs is “The Smartphone Network” to transit from a traditional model to a
company dedicated for smartphone (Mankotia, 2014). AirTel’s brand name, logo, uniforms
that employees wear and Servicescape contribute to visual identity in brand differentiation
which has been acknowledged by several scholars (Aaker, 1996; Boyle, 1996; Kotler, 1973;
Onkvisit & Shaw, 1989).
Figure 2. AirTel brand current logo (Source: www.airtel.com )

4. 3
Service companies have only cues such as service’s price and the physical appearance of the
facilities (Zeithmal, 1981) and it is similar to the package of the physical product. Price
comparison is easier than the physical evidence cues, which are quiet hard to be compared by
the customers. AirTel’s physical evidence is linked to the organisation’s vision and goals.
This so called Servicescape takes the role in the form of package, facilitator, socializer and
differentiator as mentioned by Bitner (1992). There are three kinds of servicescape namely
self-service, interpersonal and remote servicescape. Self-service affects only consumers who
use the service. Interpersonal servicescape affects both the consumers and employees
whereas a remote servicescape in which only the environment affects only the employees.
In the interpersonal servicescape aspect, AirTel’s physical complexity is more elaborate,
which facilitates the interaction between the employees and consumers to deliver its pre-paid,
post-paid, data and digital TV services under one roof. The warm and cool interior facility
design and lighting in the relationship center differentiates from the competitor’s physical
appearance. This is the only tangible aspect among the five dimensions of service quality
(i.e., SERVQUAL attributes – reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles)
as mentioned by Parasuraman (1993) to have a significant impact on the consumers’
perceptions of service quality (Bitner, 1992). It is also a proof of service delivery in relation
to the price which determines the level of customer satisfaction. The AirTel iconic ringtone
that was composed by music director A.R. Rahman is still being used by AirTel today in all
its customer relationship centers, advertisements and also during the call waiting time for any
query in the remote servicescape. This music is clearly a consistent socializing and
differentiating element for the brand to convey its eternal youth identity through
communicating the personality status.
Positioning services effectively involve more than marketing efforts such as the designing the
service blueprint and the process itself is the product (Heskett, 1990,p. 53). In the remote and
self-service servicescape, AirTel is supported by IBM support processes and has good
relationship with the company for integrating the customer facing process alongside all
platforms. Examples can include customer SIM card activation time reduction from days to
hours, customer self-service through USSD/SMS facility, web and interactive voice response
system, generation of unbilled information to the postpaid customers via SMS. Although
these support systems are invisible to the customer as seen in the service blueprint figure 3,
the company integrates information from the websites, social media, retail outlet, advertising
and promotion, billing to communicate the Service Quality Proposition (SQP) to the

5. 4
customers in a seamless and flawless way (Srikapardhi, 2014). Websites today are very
useful for consumers to find the information they needed and also is a very powerful
judgmental tool for the Indian consumers to perceive the service quality in terms of
competitive edge, efficiency, fulfillment and reliability (Santos, 2003; Zeithaml, et al., 1996).
An examination of AirTel’s Servicescape (including e-servicescape like website) can be very
useful in understanding consumers’ perception formation that can be used to position itself
from the competition. This will be discussed with recommendations to improve the
positioning of the brand.
Figure 3. Service Blueprint – AirTel
AirTel uses various platforms like advertising in radio, television, social media, news stories
and signage consistently to provide tangible cues, capitalize on WOM, advertise to
employees and create advertising continuity to make the service understood (Mortimer,
2002). The brand creates pervasiveness by making impossible for customers to get the
advertisements unnoticed. AirTel’s ads scores reasonably well on the grounds of imagery and
music. The communications that have been grasped by the consumers about the company like
WOM and publicity are the most common forms of external brand communications (Berry,
2000; Hill & Gandhi, 1992). Advertising literature indicates that cognitive, emotion and
experience are key intermediate advertising effects. AirTel recognizes this fact and
incorporates intangibility and emotions in its external communications for the consumers to
discern its brand identity. Also, the high quality service promise which is its functional core

6. 5
protects itself from against the unlikely consumer experiences as suggested by Aaker (2004).
External brand communications are moderately effective for AirTel because of the firm’s
limited efforts to manage the internal marketing communications to the employees to deliver
the promise as shown in the figure 4. An example is, facilitating internal channels of
coordination between front end executives in relationship centers, retailers who sell the
company products and back end support staff pays-off to reduce the gap between service
delivery and customer expectations.
Figure 4. Services Marketing triangle (Kotler, 1997)
Consumer Service Experience:
Service always comes with an experience (Carbone & Haeckel, 1994). Dr. Jai Menon (2007),
Director of IT and Innovation, AirTel, said “Our new strategy is all about delivering a truly
differentiated experience and having the flexibility to continually improve the customer
experience”. AirTel’s advanced capabilities of integration enables to transform core aspects
of customer experience. One of the examples is the ability to cut down the time required to
activate the accounts by 90% through maximum efficiency. AirTel’s consumer experience
encompasses every aspect of company’s offering such as customer care quality, advertising,
servicescape, service features (not limited to Value-added features and 4G), connectivity,
ease of use and reliability. The company also understands that secret to a good experience lies
in embedding the core or fundamental value proposition in its offerings and not in the
multiplicity of features as described by Meyer & Schwager (2007). As we have seen about
advertising and servicescape above, the following will be addressed in context to operations
or quality of services being offered by AirTel.
The five key dimensions that is used to assess the service company are reliability,
responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles. It is a revised model by Parasuraman et al.,

7. 6
(1993), which was based on a study on five service companies including a telecommunication
firm. The five dimensions will be explained as follows with respect to AirTel, India.
Tangibles: The Company uses modern equipment in the relationship centers including mobile
handsets and kiosks that gives consumers a good perception about the brand. This element is
very important in the emerging countries like India, where the consumers evaluate strongly
based on the amount of sophisticated technology elements that is employed. Especially, the
younger consumer segments has a positive affinity to the brand. Employee uniforms which
are modestly formal and neat looking (not many service providers other than Vodafone and
AirTel stresses so much importance on this), bill desks at touch points and overall visually
appealing interior servicescape actually associates the brand meaning in the minds of the
consumers. The company uses its campaign information on its floor walls in most of the
relationship centers.
Reliability: As noted through observation, Value added services (VAS) are the highest
contributor of revenues for telecommunication companies in India including AirTel. The
consumers’ service perception of VAS is more for Vodafone, and AirTel is trailing behind
which is due to fact of lack of personalization, reliability and comfort in use attributes (Gupta
& Nagpal, 2014). AirTel brand has been modestly reliable for more than a decade for its
network clarity and customer care services as promised. This dimension has been the most
important for the brand to communicate its consistency through keeping its promises,
services delivered appropriately with provision and resolving the consumer problems.
Consumers are also highly dependable on the company to resolve their problems. The
reliability and trust factor is also amplified by the brand ambassadors with names of few like
A.R. Rahman, cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar, Shah Rukh Khan from the company’s
advertising strategies.
Responsiveness: In telecommunication, responsiveness is communicated by the length of
time customers wait in the relationship centers or in the customer care call(s) for assistance,
promptness of answers to questions and the level of detailed attention to the problems and
understanding of the issue.

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Assurance: AirTel has sustainable high performance culture that assures the best innovative
quality services available in the country at an affordable cost. Assurance is an important
factor in delivering services especially in telecommunication queries where customers expect
a level of technical expertise and courtesy from the customer care executives as well.
Assurance creates customers confidence and is likely to be affected when the issue is
repetitive in nature even after the query is thought to be solved by the customer care
executive. In the digital world today, where people want to stay connected by every second,
this makes customers perceive it as moderate risk if the communication fails and the feel of
uncertainty might erode the customers’ loyalty and trust of the brand.
Empathy: The brand deliver services with its individualised plans, for instance, “myPlan” in
which customers can choose their proposition of talk time hours, mobile data, text messaging
limit, STD calls with in the country and roaming plans. Understanding that India is a
collectivist culture, the brand offers “One family one plan” to signify that this brand
recognises the culture and family values and provides to fulfil the gap through offering
uniquely in its first place. The Company empathizes with people in its promotion through
emotional campaign like “Barriers break when people talk”. This makes the customers feel
themselves unique and special.

9. 8
Assessmentof Organisation’s activities and recommendations to improve
AirTel’s brand positioning:
Service Quality:
AirTel is ranked 2nd amongst the most valuable Indian brands in 2014 and 1st in the
telecommunication sector. Although, this is a credible result for an organisation that is
operating for almost two decades, it is really essential for the brand to build its positioning for
a sustainable competitive advantage and attain the personality status of the most loved brand
by 2015. Based on observation and secondary data, recommendations will be made wherever
necessary to improve its service quality to satisfy customers or exceed expectations. As
illustrated by Parasuraman et al., (1985), SERVQUAL model is commonly used to assess the
service quality. Figure 5 illustrates the SERVQUAL gaps model of Service quality.
Figure 5. “SERVQUAL” Gaps model of Service quality (Parasuraman, et al., 1985)

10. 9
Customer gap is the difference between perceptions and expectations of the customer
(Parasuraman, 1993). Based on the observation, expectations from customers are to have a
consistent pricing, clear communication messages and promises being delivered to them in a
consistent manner. Price is an easy way to compare alternative services (Aaker, 1996) and on
pricing, the company has changed its strategies from time to time which affect the service
reliability dimension. For example, AirTel’s VoIP- voice over internet protocol service plan
which was introduced by the company (Krishnamurthy & Abrar, 2014) to avoid the internet
services cannibalizing the voice services revenue made customers dissatisfied with this move
even though none of the competitors introduced a plan to provoke customers by charging
consumers differently for using Skype or similar ones. Although this has been rolled back
within few days, the perceived cause of events will influence the perceptions of customers’
satisfaction as well. Another example which may disrupt consumers’ perception is “AirTel’s
4G Plans are lower than 3G plans” (Mahajan, 2014) which might seem over delivering the
promises but infact aggragating desired service levels by the current 3G consumers. It is the
customers’ perceptions of service that determines the true brand values.
Apart from the customer gap, there are four other gaps that might exist within the service
organisation and hence referred to as provider gaps. They are knowledge gap, service design
and standards gap, service performance gap and communications gap.
Gap 1: Knowledge gap
Employees’ lack of first-hand information about the services offered was observed during the
conversation with the customer care executives on a query regarding automatic balance
deduction from the virtual account. This might be due to the improper knowledge of
employees who delivers the services or there is limited empowerment of the frontline
personnel. This is also true in queries related to Value Added Services (VAS) queries where
frontline executives facing customers directly can’t resolve the issue due to the insufficient
authority provided to them but know a great deal about customers. The gap widens due to
lack of upward communication to the management who can address it. Since Consumers
experiences are collected at “touch points” (Meyer & Schwager, 2007), each touch point
gives opportunities or challenges to the company to vary the expected and actual service
levels to delight the customer or anything less. This understanding of customer experience
requires capturing rich information across all customer interactions with the service provider
and even other service providers that support the overall customer activity (Teixeira, et al.,

11. 10
2012) and also must know to act when customers expereince a service failure. Technology
must be used to build powerful relationship management and tailor the services uniquely to
the individuals (Bitner, et al., 2010)
Gap 2: Service design and standards gap
Service encounters are much more than the point of staff-customer interactions, sometimes
referred to as “moment of truth” or simply “customer contact” (Chase, 1981) and provide an
opportunity for emotional engagement (Berry & Carbone, 2007). It has been observed during
a tele conversation with the customer care executives that a customer who is waiting for a
query to be resolved, is then enquired and diverted to the concerned technical team for
resolution which is in total makes the wait time hectic for the customers. A key
recommendation to address this issue is the adequate training of frontline customer contact
staff with basic technical skills to use the technology as a customer-driven standard so that a
significant amount of calls can be dealt by a single executive contact point for the customers.
This facilitates measurement of service operations through customer defined service
standards rather than company driven service standards and incorporating as a measure of
hard standards in service blueprinting. This is expected to make changes in the overall
turnaround time by the renovation in the service process design for the average call wait time
and in turn reduce the service design and standards gap. In examining the company’s website,
having an online chat seems to be a viable option that can be incorporated in the service
blueprint to depict the possibility of serving the customer more effectively with the use of
technology (Bitner, et al., 2010). Customers must be communicated how the progress might
look like and the company must set goals and criteria to be examined at times.
Gap 3: Service performance gap
A good example of service performance gap is an issue (example) of delivering a promised
service which is “100% bill guarantee”. It has been noted that a chunk of consumers
complaining to the company for exaggerating the bill statements inaccurately in the post-paid
usage and a few complaints related to the data services charges in the pre-paid service
delivery. This underperformance of not living up to the promises might backfire what have
been regularly promised to consumers through various channels of communications by the
brand. AirTel needs to manage the customer expectation (CEM – Customer Experience
Management) in delivering the services of this kind. It has been noted from many instances
(Mouthshut, 2015) that the area that impacts most on the customer satisfaction is spontaneity

12. 11
and coping of employee to the consumers’ problems in relevance to the service performance
gap.
Gap 4: Communications gap
Communications gap exist in terms of poor process depiction to customers on process and
physical evidence of touch points, inconsistency in updating information across relationship
centers and in brand communications. Process depiction to the consumers via Service
blueprint is missing in the relationship centers (physical evidence). For example, photographs
or videos can be used to depict the process to the consumers who can understand how to get
the query solved in a relatively easier way at all relationship centers. Inconsistency in
regularly updating the information (i.e., tangibles) between the relationship centers was noted
demographically. Although this might be due to the fact that customers don’t expect much
from the relationship centers in the semi-urban areas, this might create a mixed perception of
the brand in the consumers’ minds. Servicescape although more functional in its role, AirTel
needs to have it incorporated in the facility design uniquely so that customers have the clear
line of recognition of the brand from the competition (for example: Vodafone’s logo – red
color background is also similar to AirTel, which is the second largest network operator in
India and can disrupt the consumer perceptions in the brand recall and recognition).
Renovating the evidence combines with clear presentation of the brand with an element of
youth fashion will send clear external communication messages to the consumers as a good
advertising strategy.
Simply to put, Services are the way forward for companies to clearly differentiate their
offerings in the marketplace because of its intangibility, heterogeneity, perishability and
inseparability. AirTel conveys its brand personality as mentioned by Berry (2000) through
the company’s presented brand, external brand communications, customer experience with
the company, brand awareness and brand meaning. On Brand expression, the company is
recommended to change its logo with a mixture of black and red instead of just red
bacground to reduce the imitation cue of rival brand Vodafone and as a measure to increase
its uniqueness. Brand’s advertising strategy of Airtel is a plausible one and it communicates
the messages promptly to the consumers in all possible medium mainly via WOM because of
its good service quality and loyal customer base. Logo, name and advertising are just the
visible tip of the brand iceberg to signify “what the brand stands for”. For any brand to
communicate “who we are” it must keep its promises by creating customer experiential

13. 12
values such as service quality, customer relations, service recovery strategies, personnel and
other operations. It is the later that creates brand loyalty and confidence. As the evaluation of
consumer experience depends on the customer’s expectations and his/her interaction with the
company’s offering in correspondence to the different moments of touch-points
(Mouncey,2003), the brand should try to reduce the customer gap by focusing on its
servicescapes for instance, on virtual servicescape, creation of interactive websites that are to
the customers are very important in appealing to customers with rich content (eg: videos) as
suggested by Luís, et al., (2013) to communicate the market leadership in its service
offerings.
Customer gaps can be addressed through consistency across all brand touch points like
advertising, employee partners, social media, review sites, website, signage and WOM.
Provider gaps can be reduced by interpreting customers’ expecations and customer activity
through adequate market research, service operations by customer defined standards and
appropriate physcial evidence including virutal servicescape i.e., 24 hour online chat via
website, focus on customer relationship management through employee-technology job fit
and manage the service expectations, service recovery strategies and communication
strategies like upward communication and proper customer education through process
depiction via service blueprinting in the relationship centers.
A study suggests that Indian consumers are willing to spend more for good services
(BestmediaInfo, 2014). This adds an argument for the brand to employ the recommendations
to attain the desired brand personality status “to become the most loved brand by 2015”. As
the saying goes “There is no business without emotions” and customer experience must be
created in a way that will mutually benefit the company and the customer through an eternal
relationship.

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