Telecom Italia Mobile

Tools used
Forte Application Environment™, Forte Express™ and DS Data Systems' DORE Framework, Java, DCE and CORBA.

Type of Industry:
Telecommunications

Description:
Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), Italy's largest mobile communications operator, is deploying a multi-thousand user ``virtual customer service center'' built with the Forte Application Environment™, Forte Express™ and DS Data Systems' DORE Framework. The customer service application currently supports more than 2,000 simultaneous users, with a goal of supporting 4,000 users two years after initial deployment.

Telecom Italia Mobile, which has more than ten million subscribers, was running its customer care operations on a mainframe system developed in-house. The organization needed an open, highly scalable, enterprise solution to create a customer care system that would help TIM maintain its leadership in the fast-growing, competitive telecommunications industry.

TIM decided to create a virtual customer service center that would provide its customers with fast, real-time support and that would enable its service representatives to help customers regardless of their location. The new application supporting this virtual center needed to integrate with traditional and open technologies including Java, DCE and CORBA; present a GUI that would give service representatives information in a clear, concise form; and offer the scalability and openness to give TIM complete freedom in selecting future hardware and complementary software solutions.

TIM began the successful rollout of its customer service application, called SICC (Informational System for Customer Care) in December 1997. The application was released to approximately 300 users each week, until it achieved today's user base of more than 2,100 customer service representatives located at ten TIM locations in Italy.

"Providing excellent customer service requires powerful application development tools," said Gianluigi Di Francesco, IT vice president of TIM. "Our SICC system developed with Forte, Forte Express and DORE helps us provide faster, more accurate solutions to customers and to capture feedback that we share throughout our organization. It is part of TIM's commitment to offer our customers superior service and to continually improve our product quality and market offerings."

It is essential that TIM customer service representatives provide a rapid response. To achieve this, customer calls are routed to a support specialist who quickly handles questions and resolves issues. SICC manages all aspects of call tracking, allowing TIM operators to perform activities including logging and routing cases, verifying contracts, reviewing case histories, and tracking case-related costs.

Forte Express enabled TIM to develop a robust workflow management architecture to create a call flow process that includes queues, work-in- progress activities, business rules, commitments, and auto-adaptive destination rules. SICC records the actions chosen to solve a customer's issue as part of the customer's case history, making it possible to review and improve procedures. In addition, SICC provides detailed tracking capabilities that allow TIM to monitor research time and activities; costs associated with a specific case; commitments made to or by customers; and field service time, expenses and parts used.

Forte Express's multi-tier architecture enabled TIM to develop this complex, scalable enterprise system with maximum productivity and efficiency. Forte is key to the SICC application because it allows complex querying and data manipulation, optimizing resources and minimizing network traffic. Forte's application partitioning provides TIM with the scalability to support the expanding customer base.

Forte's code generation and reuse capability enabled TIM to spend less time building basic functionality and more time on crucial business issues. In addition, Forte's fail-over functionality offered TIM the high level of reliability required for this application devoted to supporting customers in real-time.

"Because SICC services a huge, complex customer environment, it must support a wide range of hardware, operating systems and databases," said David Taber, Forte Software's senior vice president of marketing. "We are pleased that TIM relied on Forte to create a robust, versatile application that fulfills the company's sophisticated requirements, and that will keep pace with TIM's customer-focused vision."

Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), headquartered in Rome, is part of the Telecom Italia Group, which leads voice and data communications operators in Italy and has offices, partners and clients globally. TIM, with more than 10 million subscribers, is the largest mobile telecommunications company in Europe and the third largest in the world. The company's 1997 consolidated revenue was more than US$5 billion.