ENHANCING SERVICES FOR CUSTOMERS AT HOME AND ON THE GO
With appetites for mobile entertainment growing, our associates have expanded their suite of digital content through partnerships with local and global content providers. In India, Airtel partnered Hotstar, the country’s largest streaming platform, and Amazon Prime Video to enhance content offerings on the Airtel TV app. In Thailand, AIS added new content to offer over 100 channels on its AIS Play app, providing customers with more entertainment choices. In the Philippines, Globe expanded its range of Asian programmes with Viu, while Telkomsel in Indonesia introduced Catchplay, Nickelodeon and SuperSoccer. All our associates also offer HOOQ’s Hollywood and original local content.
In the home, our associates are driving the subscription of broadband solutions. Globe launched prepaid home broadband plans to reach more households in the Philippines. AIS Fibre expanded its coverage to reach 50 cities and 6 million households.
TRANSFORMING CUSTOMER SERVICE
As more customer interactions move online, our associates continued to make improvements to their respective flagship apps. Both Airtel and AIS unveiled enhanced versions of their apps which enable customers to receive notifications, perform DIY services, access privileges, as well as products and services previously available only in-store. Telkomsel introduced GraPARI Virtual, a self-care customer solution which combines artificial intelligence and analytics to deliver a faster and more precise customer experience on its digital channels.
DELIVERING FASTER SPEEDS
Our associates are investing in their networks and technology, particularly for mobile broadband coverage and capacity to meet the surge in data demand and deliver a fast, seamless entertainment experience. The performance of their mobile networks has been consistently ranked among the fastest in their respective countries by independent speed tests. In Thailand, AIS launched the NEXT G mobile network which is capable of internet speeds of up to 1Gbps while in the Philippines, Globe deployed MIMO technology to expand and enhance its LTE network.
FORGING CLOSER GROUP COLLABORATION
A collaborative approach is critical to thriving in the fast-changing digital world without borders as our customers, especially the millennials, spend most of their time online, either consuming media or shopping. We are working closely, together with Optus, and our regional associates, leveraging our combined scale and capabilities to cooperate with strategic partners on a range of digital services that can be rolled out across the Group.
This past year has seen agreements with Mobike, Razer and ONE Championship to collaborate in areas such as e-payments, e-gaming and content which are some of our key consumer priorities.
In a first for the region, we announced an initiative to connect the Group’s telco wallets across markets to offer seamless cross-border payments at physical merchants. This will empower our customers to securely and conveniently pay with their mobile wallets when they travel in Asia Pacific while helping small merchants expand their reach to millions more in the process. ASEAN heads of state had a chance to experience how this payment service would work at the 32nd ASEAN Summit held in Singapore, ahead of the first phase commercial launch between Singtel and AIS. Other mobile payment apps and our Bridge Alliance of telco partners can potentially plug into the platform and gain ready access to our merchant and customer bases throughout the region.
This complements the Singtel Open Platform, a group-wide payment gateway, which already enables our customers to make purchases online using direct carrier billing or their respective telco mobile wallets.
