Abstract - Use of a GIS in the On-line Customer Care Service Environment of the TIM Italian Mobile Telephone System Operator

Track: Telecommunications

G. DiFrancesco
Telecom Italia Mobile S.p.A.
Via Luigi Rizzo
Rome, 42
ITALY

Telephone:
Fax:

R. Vicentini

Use of a GIS in the On-line Customer Care Service Environment of the TIM Italian Mobile Telephone System Operator

Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) is the first mobile telephone operator in Italy, serving over 5.7 million customers with their TACS and GSM cellular telephone network. Customer queries of any nature are handled by eight service centers located throughout Italy, working around the clock seven days a week. On average 60,000 calls are received every day, 10 percent of which relate to coverage of cities, transportation routes, and rural areas by the existing and planned cellular network. Focusing on the goal to provide increasing levels of service to their existing and prospective customers, TIM has decided to implement a GIS that will enable their customer care operators to provide answers on-line to requests relevant to coverage. The GIS has been built on an existing network architecture, where each service center's LAN is geographically interconnected with the other service centers. Client/Server technology is used to connect each individual operator workstation to the database where the complete geographic coverage of the major Italian cities to a scale of 1:10,000 and residual territory to a scale of 1:250,000 is stored. Spatial Database Engine is used to provide concurrent real-time access to the geographic data. Each service center, designed to provide the full range of services, has the same hardware/software architecture, including SDE and the complete range of cellular telephone, as well as the geographical coverage database. When fully deployed, the system will have up to 2,000 operators on-line at peak time. The operator workstations access the data using an application linked to the MapObjects GIS libraries, providing a user-friendly interface optimized for a real-time, on-line environment. The GIS has been designed to be upgradable, so as to make it the backbone of geography-related mission-critical business systems for TIM.