Virgin Mobile India

Virgin Mobile India

175px
Type	Joint venture
Industry	Telecommunications
Founded	2 March 2008
Headquarters	New Delhi, Delhi, India
Products	Mobile telephony, broadband internet services
Parent	Virgin Group (50%) Tata Teleservices (50%)
Slogan	"Hatke Experience" !
Website	www.virginmobile.in

Virgin Mobile India Limited was a cellular telephone service provider company, operated as a joint venture between Tata Teleservices and Richard Branson's Virgin Group. The company used Tata's CDMA and GSM networks to offer its services under the brand name Virgin Mobile, and also started GSM services in some states. "Virgin Mobile" branded services were offered to Indian consumers by Tata Teleservices through a brand franchise with Virgin Mobile. Virgin Mobile India provided Tata Teleservices with experience and expertise in designing, marketing and servicing of "Virgin Mobile" branded products for the youth segment. Virgin Mobile marketed prepaid and postpaid on both GSM as well as CDMA, and also offered wireless services under the brand name Datamax.

Virgin Mobile was India's first national youth-focused mobile service, with over 45,00,000 outlets reaching over 3,20,00000 cities, towns and villages across India.

It was also ranked as the No. 1 for customer satisfaction within the first year of its launch with an overall score of over 95%. It was judged the "Buzziest Brands of 2009" i.e. the most searched for brands by surfers, in a survey carried out by a leading online portal in India.

The company was merged into Tata's other subsidiary Tata DoCoMo in 2015.

Network coverage

Virgin mobile service was available in the following circles.

State	CDMA	GSM
Andhra Pradesh & Telangana
Assam
Bihar & Jharkhand
Chennai
Delhi
Uttar Pradesh (East)
Gujarat
Haryana
Himachal Pradesh
Jammu and Kashmir
Karnataka
Kerala
Kolkata
Madhya Pradesh & Chhattisgarh
Maharashtra & Goa
Mumbai
North-East
Orissa
Punjab
Rajasthan
Tamil Nadu
West Bengal
Uttar Pradesh (West)

Marketing

Virgin Mobile refreshed its campaign by starting a channel on YouTube called indianpangaleague. Since the inception of the campaign, YouTube has logged over 610,975 views, around 20,893 channel views and more than 300 subscribers. It signed on actor Ranbir Kapoor as its brand ambassador. It also came up with a "Yoyo tariff" which allowed friends to keep calls between them free by getting 10p for incoming and paying 10p for outgoing. The campaign was created by Bates 141. It initially gained a huge response as Virgin was the only mobile service provider who paid for incoming calls. In the late 2009 Virgin Mobile India also started relying on manned kiosks as the alternate channels for sales and branding. It was their endeavour to improve their customer service and to thus attract more customers to know Virgin Mobile’s latest offers and deals. Thus, Virgin Mobile India chose to pilot unmanned kiosks and evaluate the success of the pilot by saving costs and attract subscribers to interact with Virgin Mobile applications, buy recharge coupons, download freebies and paid value added services (VAS) content like wallpaper and ringtones. Virgin mobile India provide only 2G data with EDGE services.

Merger with TATA DoCoMo

Tata Teleservices merged Virgin Mobile India into its other subsidiary Tata DoCoMo on 27 March 2015. The merger was completed automatically, meaning customer accounts and existing balances were transferred automatically.

External links

• Official website