In an effort to help maintain healthy social distancing practices, Vodafone Idea has launched a voice-based contactless recharge method aimed at retail stores. The feature will be implemented through Vodafone Idea’s Smart Connect retailer app.
“In order to facilitate contactless recharges, Smart Connect is now enabled with voice-based recharge feature and is available at all Vodafone Idea own stores and multi-branded stores.”, said the company in a statement.
In ideal scenarios, retailers usually ask customers to enter the phone number they wish to recharge for. With this feature present in the Smart Connect app, users will not have to manually enter the number and can simply speak the number out, which the app recognizes using Google’s voice recognition.
The step comes at a time when retailers in Green and Orange zones have gradually started reopening stores. The feature is limited to English and Hindi languages for now but support for voice input in more languages is said to be added soon.
Speaking of the initiative, Ambrish Jain, Chief Operating Officer, Vodafone Idea said, “As a customer-oriented telecom operator, it is our constant endeavor to come up with products and services relevant to the times and keep our customers connected at all times. In line with our Digital-first approach, we are digitizing our processes to offer convenient and efficient services to our nearly 300 million customers. The industry-first, voice-based contactless Recharge enables recharges without touch and is extremely relevant in these times when maintaining social distancing is the need of the hour to stay safe”.
With all that said, a safer way to perform recharges would undoubtedly be through online channels. In fact, Vodafone Idea has recently launched a new program it calls ‘Recharge Saathi’ in partnership with Paytm to reward additional commission when Paytm users perform online Vodafone Idea prepaid recharges.
