Swisscom Mobile AG

Providing Faster and Better Service at Lower Cost

Swisscom is Switzerland’s leading telco, delivering all services and products for mobile, fixed and IP-based voice and data communications. Swisscom Mobile AG, owned by the Swisscom Group (75%) and the Vodafone Group (25%), is the market leader in the Swiss mobile communications sector, operating several wireless networks including the nationwide GSM network with more than 4.4 million customers. Swisscom Mobile’s services are also available throughout the world via over 400 roaming partner networks.

Customer Challenges

Reduce IT complexity and recurring operation costs
Accelerate the provisioning process without compromising on security
Improve and standardize customer care

Solution

Swisscom deployed Sun systems, software, and services to enable the company’s 1,200 retail stores to immediately connect to Siebel-based customer relationship management (CRM) and point-of-sale (POS) applications.

Business Results

Saves more than 5m Swiss Francs (approx. $4M) per year
Enables retail outlets to serve customers faster at point-of-sale
Reduces selling costs and training expenses at retail outlets
Offers real-time, secure access to Siebel applications
Improves customer service
Provides investment protection with open standards
Provides a return on investment (ROI) in three years

Products and Services

Story Details

Swisscom Mobile needed to realize its goals of providing optimal, standardized customer care, maximizing the effectiveness of the existing distribution and retail channels to better engage customers, and increasing revenue from new voice and data services. Swisscom Mobile selected Sun Microsystems to reduce IT complexity and costs by streamlining access for 1,200 retail outlets to the company’s Siebel applications to better serve customers and increase revenue.

The Sun infrastructure enables Swisscom’s retail stores to immediately connect to Siebel-based CRM and POS applications, enabling them to provision new subscriber services directly at the point of sale, accelerating the provisioning process. This benefits customers and Swisscom alike: customers get faster access to more services, improving their overall satisfaction; and Swisscom achieves increased sales and higher revenue.

" The Sun Java Identity Management Suite has significantly improved the efficiency of our customer service at our points of sales. "

— Christian Kattenbusch, Project manager, Swisscom Mobile

The Sun solution includes Sun Fire servers running the Solaris Operating System, which takes maximum advantage of the highly threaded Siebel architecture, resulting in blazing performance and massive scalability. The solution also provides Sun’s certified, agentless standard Identity Management adapter for Seibel CRM, so Swisscom can protect its investments in CRM software. In order to manage the access to the applications in a well defined way, Swisscom Mobile selected Sun OpenSSO Enterprise, which manages the profiles and the user rights for all users and enables “single-sign-on” to all applications. Swisscom chose Sun Java System Identity Manager to manage protocols that describe all profiles and roles in the workflow processes.

Due to the Sun Java Identity Management Suite, all Swisscom Mobile POS outlets can now directly access the central CRM applications. This allows them, for example, to immediately propose specific offers to customers, based on their usage profiles, without having to liaise with Swisscom Mobile each time. Since implementing the Sun solution, the retail outlets have also decreased the cost of a sale and reduced the training requirements of shop staff for each new service launch. Customer service levels have also increased and can be easily measured with a satisfaction indicator within the Swisscom Mobile shop. In addition, the Sun solution is helping ensure retail outlets will benefit from future improvements as new services and changes in the POS system will be updated and available to the retail outlets in real time.