The Digital Transformation Journey Of Mahindra Comviva

A subsidiary of Tech Mahindra and a part of the $21 billion Mahindra Group, Comviva is one of the rising stars in the mobility solutions industry with an extensive portfolio of solutions ranging from mobile finance, digital payments, customer value management to mobile data and managed VAS services. Comviva has been a tour de force in inspiring a communication revolution. 

However, there was a lot of manual effort and lack of proper process in onboarding and training their end-users, i.e. telecom operators, across multiple applications. This has turned out to be a huge challenge for Mahindra Comviva. Technical documentation also requires high effort as the high-level support queries were resulting in high response time. This urged the telecom technology company to collaborate with Whatfix, a SaaS-based platform to provide in-app guidance and performance support for web applications and software products. This not only helped Comviva to solve challenges related to time-consuming training videos but also made it easy for them to onboard new customers.

To understand the case better, Analytics India Magazine spoke to Prema Vibhute, Deputy General Manager of Technical Documentation and UI/UX, Comviva, and Khadim Batti, the CEO and co-founder of Whatfix.

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Transforming The Legacy

The challenges around accessibility to learning documentation, syncing with the product as many change requests are delivered without documentation, time-consuming training videos, and onboarding of users have encouraged the company to go digital.

“Comviva decided to pivot from a manual, time and resource-intensive approach to onboarding and training to one that was more personalised, intuitive and utilised the core solutions used by their end-users on a daily basis,” said Khadim. “This made Comviva partner with us to transform training, onboarding and support to a contextual, user-centric experience.”

Khadim said Comviva was seeking a two-pronged strategy with the ability to deliver value to end-users and provide internal training. To facilitate this, Whatfix suggested Whatfix Flows for step-by-step in-application guidance; a multiformat content for an automatic content generation; Whatfix Self Help for contextual and on-demand help; and data governance using Whatfix Smart Tips.

The project began with discovery and audit, where Whatfix identified the key applications and the challenges specific to each of the aspects. “We needed to capture main tasks, completion obstacles and other key metrics. So, we analysed the current documentation processes and determined the areas of improvements,” said Khadim. 

The company then translated application tasks to Whatfix Flows. Whatfix Flows are a series of steps to help users to learn an objective or complete a task through a series of step-by-step actions. These steps display as a layer over Comviva’s web application. This involved mapping user context based on end-users’ organisations and application usage to Whatfix Flows. “It was important to isolate specific trouble steps within workflows — areas that might be more complex, and link just-in-time help content to provide an easy and seamless user experience,” explained Khadim. Further, Whatfix conducted testing to improve and refine walkthroughs. 

To make it easy to share and distribute the walkthroughs within the organisation, Whatfix even configured automatic multiformat content generation, such as PDFs, slideshows etc. It has also set up a Self Help module for users (telecom operators).

When asked Comviva about the project, Vibhute said, “We have deployed an export solution and not the cloud version due to high customisation in the product and security related issues at client locations, which ultimately blocks the cloud access.” She added, “Challenges with deployment were there initially, but the support from Whatfix was excellent and beyond expectations, and this has helped us overcome these issues in no time.”

Whatfix is an application-agnostic platform and does not require code-level knowledge at the user or admin end. Comviva used Whatfix on internal applications pertaining to marketing and communications. Alongside, Whatfix is also implemented in end user-facing applications to onboard and train wholesalers and retailers.

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Involvement of Machine Learning

Another aspect that massively impacted the digital transformation of Comviva is Smart Context. With machine learning, Whatfix’s Smart Context can automatically identify the best content to be shown to a user. Smart Context intelligently eliminates the need to create multiple segments manually to display relevant content contextually to different audiences on an application.

Explaining the process, Khadim said, “When end-users of different organisations access Comviva applications, Whatfix Smart Context intelligently segments and displays only the most relevant content for the specific user.” Using a combination of intelligent segmentation, based on machine learning, helped Comviva improve the accuracy and relevance of the on-demand help content displayed to application users.

Whatfix is able to do that by capturing the user interface element on any page along with ten other attributes of the element such as Document Object Model, which is a cross-platform and language-independent interface, Page Hierarchy, Application Module etc. “When the user seeks help from Whatfix, we understand the page context meaning on which module of the application the user is in,” said Khadim. “Based on that, using our proprietary Element Finding technology, we show help content relevant to the user on that page rather than showing all the content.”

The Element Finding algorithm has been trained to understand the application context to show the right content when the user is on Module A of Application A based on element attributes captured during content creation. Smart Context also ensures that if the user is not on the first screen of a flow, it starts the flow from the most relevant page that the user is on. This is also possible because machine learning knows the page context based on the learning of which modules/submodules/popup modals come in which part of the application.

Consequently, Comviva no longer required manual segmentation and assignment of support content for each user. This has significantly reduced the time and effort taken to create, update and publish content for Comviva across applications.

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Wrapping Up

With the help of Whatfix, Comviva was able to see a reduction in onboarding time and training efforts. The knowledge base of Comviva was integrated with Whatfix’s Self-Help module so that users have a one-stop help within the app and the self-help feature acts as the single source of truth. 

There was a marked reduction in the time taken to create supporting documentation and videos. The measurement and analysis feature by Whatfix also helped Comviva gather user feedback and insights to understand documentation usage and effectiveness. Not only the company was able to churn out videos faster from the already existing flows, but also the automatically churned “How to” videos with the help of machine learning, have helped users operate hands-on. Lastly, the Smart Tips feature is excellent to have firsthand information.