www.rcom.

com

Reliance Communications
Limited
Year of Establishment ‐ 2004

Area of specialization: Integrated telecommunications services over a convergent (voice,

data and video), next generation digital network.

Field of Innovation: CRM upgradation.

Company Overview: Reliance Communications is the flagship company of the Anil

Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) of companies. Listed on the National Stock Exchange and
the Bombay Stock Exchange, it is India’s leading integrated telecommunication company
with over 40 million customers. The company’s business encompasses a complete range of
telecom services covering mobile and fixed line telephony. It includes broadband, national
and international long distance services and data services along with an exhaustive range of
value‐added services and applications.

The Innovation: The innovation was centered around Reliance Communication’s CRM
system, which needed to be upgraded to improve performance, scalability and stability,
improve transactional integrity across systems to address operational pain areas and
implement database storage transformation. Normally, the technical complexities of the
process would have necessitated a downtime of about seven days. The innovation was to
shrink the 7‐day downtime to zero‐downtime for the major upgrade of the CRM application
and associated infrastructure in a live environment. This was completed in a seamless
manner so that customer service, revenue and reputation was not impacted or
compromised in any manner. RCOM prioritized the core business processes to ensure the
acquisition of new customers, the acceptance of payments, management of customer
inquiries and complaints, synchronization of transactions with external systems and
synchronization of transactions with old as well as new CRM database instances. A light‐
weight software application, named UCS (Uninterrupted Customer Service), was engineered
and developed for all the core business processes to continue unchallenged and without
compromising any Business SLAs or Customer Service Quality Levels.
Key Achievements: RCOM operated in a normal fashion, throughout the seven days when
the CRM application and associated infrastructure was upgraded. UCS (Uninterrupted
Customer Service) is now the Business Continuity solution for any planned and
unplanned outage of CRM for maintenance. As a result, the availability of the CRM has
improved to 99.99 percent from 99.9 percent which translates into improved availability
of 76 hours annually. The mitigation of “impact to profitability,” through this additional
availability, can be estimated at approximately Rs. 2.74 crore