Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Benito Martínez, Senior Manager of Online Marketing at TIM Brasil. TIM is Brazil’s second largest telecom provider and has 1,800 stores and sales points located in different states around the country. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.
In August 2012, Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) demanded Brazil's national service providers to improve the quality of service and support for mobile phone customers. We responded by developing a three-year action plan funded with R$9,5 billion. In order to communicate the plan to customers and society, we designed a mapping service to reinforce the transparency and allow over to 70 million customers to keep track of our services.
We chose the Google Maps API and Google Maps Engine for this mapping project, because they would provide our workers and customers with a familiar service, a very easy and understandable user experience, and a manageable tool to monitor and update all the information regarding the coverage of our services. Using Google Maps, we can show the location of all the company’s antennas and WiFi Hotspots, so both TIM and our clients can locate our services. We can also display where there is 2G, 3G or 4G coverage. The map details the spots that are covered by the company, as well as those where there is no coverage, and informs transparently clients on the current and future activities like antennas installed recently and those that will be installed in the future.
Since deploying these tools three months ago, we’ve been impressed with the results. We’ve increased the number of visits to our web site from 500 visits per month to over 300,000 queries on the Google mapping tools, showing the increase in customers searching for the coverage range and services we are providing them in their respective areas. We update our data monthly, so we expect this number to grow as we add more and more information. This project also generated a tighter integration between the different areas of the company. For example, the marketing and network technical departments are now working together cooperatively to offer richer information about the service to ensure the constant flow of information for our customers.
We also developed a smartphone app which provides consumers fast access to all the services that are available online. This mobile app offers more customers the tools available from our “Open Doors” website on their smartphones and tablets. We are using Android OS as one of the main development platforms due to the widespread availability of Android smartphones in Brazil.
In the future, we plan to expand the Google Maps usage in our CRM initiatives in order to communicate in a more personalized way with our customer base by offering segmented maps. Overall, we’ve seen very positive benefits from adopting Google Maps Engine and the Google Maps API.
