TIM progressing with cloud migration of datacenters, call centers

Brazilian telco TIM is on track to meet its goal of migrating all its IT datacenters to the public cloud by the end of 2023, having so far completed the migration of all its customer relationship management (CRM) systems, according to CIO Auana Mattar.

“It is an ambitious, risky, innovative program. We’re the first telco in the Americas to make this 100% migration of all IT datacenters to the cloud. The results we're getting so far are very positive,” Mattar said during the SAS Telco Summit, held online on Thursday.

TIM's three-year Journey to the Cloud project officially launched last year, but in 2019 the company had advanced with the migration of the analytics and big data systems to the cloud in a separate project.

The firm hired Google Cloud for the analytics initiative. According to Mattar, the company's proposal was better than that of competitors both from a financial and operational point of view. “[Google's proposal] gave us all the potential that we could use analytics in the cloud,” she said.

As for the datacenters, under the Journey to the Cloud project TIM tapped Microsoft and Oracle. The cloud rivals made a joint proposal to TIM and the contract was signed at the end of 2020.

Mattar said adopting a multi-cloud approach is strategic to allocate resources where they best fit. 

As such, applications more focused on financial services end up making more sense in an Oracle cloud, for example, she said.

The CRM systems migration has already generated results related to improvements in the time taken to process customer demands.

“This is cost reduction pure and simple. In the cloud, we can make a smarter allocation of computing resources with simple commands.”

Although the datacenter cloud project is focused on IT, Mattar says there are synergies with the company's telecom network operation.

"Right now we're only talking about our IT datacenters, but yes, going to the cloud speeds up the delivery of content to the client at the edge [edge computing]."

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Meanwhile, the company is also advancing the use of artificial intelligence for customer service.

Initially the project started with robotic process automation (RPA), but in January last year the operator started to develop a virtual assistant in partnership with IBM called Taís.

According to the CIO, the results obtained so far – Taís continues to "learn," adding new interactions and commands – were "very good" with the net promoting score related to Taís services coming in higher than that of human attendants.

In some cases, according to Mattar, there was an increase in retention – when the customer does not give up on the service – by up to 75%.

CALL CENTERS

In parallel to the datacenters, TIM also decided that all attendants of its call centers will remain working from home "for good."

In March last year, with the start of the pandemic, TIM had to relocate all professionals from its call centers to the remote environment.

As the results turned out positive, both on the customer care side and regarding agent satisfaction, these professionals will remain working from home “forever,” she said.

This will potentially enable, for example, the sale or return of buildings previously dedicated to these functions.

CLARO

Meanwhile at Claro Brasil, the use of analytics since the company started relying on these systems for data analysis years ago has generated 1bn reais (US$195mn) in returns, Luciano Diettrich, head of analytics at Claro, told the SAS event.

This amount, according to the executive, is an estimate of savings and refers to applications created to reduce customer churn and default, among others.