RCom Upgrades CRM With Zero Downtime

With the recent approval from Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to provide nationwide GSM services, Reliance Communications (RCom) is all set to grow its current customer base of over 38 million people. The company has ambitious plans to roll out a telecom network which will cover 23,000 towns and 600,000 villages.

This kind of escalating customer traffic needs an advanced, robust and reliable CRM system. RCom recently upgraded its five-year-old CRM system with a high quality hardware backend, without disrupting the ongoing CRM activity.

Outdated system calls for an upgrade

RCom has been using the Amdocs Clarify CRM solution for the last five years. The software, database and hardware version of the solution were outdated, and vendors failed to provide support services for the software. The old CRM system used to restart often, and the frequent downtime created customer dissatisfaction, which in turn impacted business.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

A-Z Upgradation

RCom had to upgrade everything, from database, application, and intermediate software to hardware. The Oracle database and Sun Solaris hardware were upgraded to their latest versions. In case of applications, Amdocs Clarify, Tuxedo and WebLogic had to be upgraded to their current versions. The company deliberately avoided adding new features and functionality to the new system, to reduce change management and training of employees.

Downtime means business disaster

The CRM upgrade would have taken seven days. However a company that receives 20,000 calls in any given hour and sells 60,000 cells on a good day can’t afford to have CRM down for seven days.

“In our industry that would have been a disaster; we would have lost thousands of customers every day. Our business would come to a complete standstill, if we didn’t have a CRM system for seven days,” says Sumit Chowdhury, CIO, Reliance Communications.

Hence, it was extremely critical for the company to keep the CRM alive in some form while carrying out the upgradation.

Developing an in-house system to overcome downtime

While the old system was running, the company essentially recreated the whole environment on the new platform and developed an entirely new CRM system. After the system was ready on the new version of the software, the company finally moved the data from the old system to the new one. To avoid downtime, RCom created a third system which served the customers while the transformation was in progress. Thus, the company was able to upgrade the entire CRM system without disrupting the online activity even for a minute.

“Many vendors gave us a huge quote to reduce downtime from seven days to four days. However, even more than an hour of downtime was not acceptable. We developed our in-house solution at one-hundredth of the cost, which provided 70 to 80% functionality of the original system. Achieving zero downtime as compared to seven days was a huge innovation on our part,” claims Chowdhury.

The in-house system was built on J2ee technology with Oracle as database and Sun as the hardware platform. The total cost of the solution was less than $1,00,000. The entire exercise was concluded in eight months and the upgraded CRM went live in June this year.

The upgradation had its own challenges. Apart from combating seven days of downtime, the company had to surmount the average rate of CRM upgradation. Chowdhury says that the average number of attempts to complete a CRM upgrade is three; i.e every company on an average is able to upgrade the CRM on the third attempt. However, RCom was able to upgrade its CRM in the first attempt itself. Chowdhury attributes this success to the company’s Service Oriented Architecture.

Faster response time

The upgradation has decreased downtime due to increased availability and maintenance of the system. Reliance customers are already seeing much faster response time from the new system. While the new system has started functioning, the in-house system is still live and the company wishes to use the same in the event of a downtime.

RCom aims to use this system for disaster recovery, lowering the cost of service and providing a web-based interface all over the country to its dealers and retailers.