Airtel digital TV, the DTH service by Bharti Airtel, on Thursday launched an innovative self care facility for its 7.4 million plus customers in India.

Available for free for all Airtel Mobile customers, this is the world’s first USSD based service innovation that will allow Airtel mobile customers to manage their airtel digital TV with options of recharge, movie booking and top up additions, to name a few. Customers can access the facility by simply dialling a toll free number *121# from their mobile phones.

Commenting on the launch, Shashi Arora, CEO, DTH/ Media, Bharti Airtel, said “The technology market in India is ripe for creating mobile applications that make self-care fun, and enhance the quality of customer engagement for organizations. The availability of this unique USSD facility is just another example of our constant endeavour to offer the best to our Airtel digital TV customers. We believe it will truly enrich their lives by providing them convenience of managing their Airtel digital TV account via their handheld devices”. This new service is device agnostic. 

USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) is a menu-based system that enables interfacing with content based services. Instead of a browser, which requires an internet / GPRS connection), the USSD menu acts as browser to pull content to the phone.