Airtel Adds Regional Language Support to Its *121# Prepaid Self-Care Service

Airtel on Friday announced the launch its *121# prepaid self-care service in Hindi and 10 other regional languages. The largest telecom operator in India, Airtel boasts that the launch makes it the first to offer self-care services in regional languages in the country. The company also revealed that out of its 275 million mobile subscribers, 93.7 percent are prepaid users.

Apart from English and Hindi, Airtel's *121# Digital Care is now available in Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. The operator says the addition of regional language support will make the self-care service "more accessible for millions of Airtel prepaid mobile customers across the country."

The *121# Digital Care platform allows Airtel's prepaid subscribers to get access to information like balance amount, recharge validity, details of last few transactions, as well as details of ongoing offers, without requiring to speak with a customer care executive. Users will also be able to activate/deactivate value added services on their own. Airtel says the self-care platform can be accessed via all smartphones and feature phones with regional language support, and can be initiated by dialing *121#.

Sarang Kanade, Director - Customer Experience, Bharti Airtel said, "This is yet another innovation from Airtel for the Indian market and will add to the overall service delivery experience. *121# Digital Care is already popular among our pre-paid customers given its ease of use, convenience and the introduction of regional languages will further lower the barrier to self-care adoption for basic information. The growing penetration of mobile devices with regional language support will accelerate the adoption of this platform."