SÃO PAULO – Three years after having sales banned by telecom regulator Anatel due to customer complaints, TIM is undertaking a customer experience management transformation.
Luis Minoru Shibata, who has recently assumed the position of chief strategy officer at TIM, provided RCR Wireless News with insight into the move in an exclusive interview during Futurecom 2015, held this week in São Paulo.
One of the pillars of the CEM project is to add customer perception to the list of key performance indicators measured by the operator. To understand customer satisfaction as it relates to their network experience has been a key pillar for TIM, according to Ana Cristina Oliveira, quality director at TIM.
“Our CEO, Rodrigo Abreu, set a monthly agenda focused on CEM. The meeting gathers directors from different areas, such as network, IT, customer care,” said Shibata. In 2013, TIM had defined key indicators, use cases and processes to follow.
In the new role, Shibata reports directly to Abreu and focuses on the telecom operator’s strategic planning.
“I have to understand what initiatives should be a priority,” Shibata said, adding that TIM currently manages 16 strategic projects, including concentrating all innovation tasks that were spread in different units below the CSO.
TIM has also adopted big data analytics focused on information automatization. The goal is to use information from big data to plan the network investment. One of the main challenges for not only TIM, but all carriers, is to avoid becoming a “dumb pipe.” Shibata believes a possible answer relies on conversing with the whole ecosystem to come up with different uses of connectivity.
Investment growth
During his lecture, Abreu noted Brazil is facing the shift from voice to data faster than it first predicted, and highlighted the need for network deployment to meet the traffic growth. At Futurecom, TIM announced an increase in its investment for the period of 2015-2017, jumping from R$11 billion ($2.9 billion) to R$14 billion.
“The previous forecast that data revenues would surpass voice by 2017 was anticipated to 2016,” Abreu said. One of the transformations he mentioned is the reduction of prepaid subscribers. Customers who used to have more than one SIM card have chosen to cut back as the penetration of over-the-top applications, such as WhatsApp, has increased.
Another reason is the reduction of interconnection rate. “Before WhatsApp we had a multi-SIM card battle and now we face first SIM card battle,” Abreu explained. Only last year, revenues from applications accounted for R$1.2 billion in TIM results.
