The project
Industry: Telecommunications
Location: Colombia
DIRECTV is part of AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications company, with a strong presence in North America and Latin America. It has around 1,600 employees in Colombia and more than 10,000 across the North American and Latin American markets.
How migrating to Google's cloud improved the sales process
“Now we can reduce response times, which was the essence of this project for us. We can avoid losing a sale because of speed. In terms of display times, we used to wait 3 minutes or more for information to load; now it can take around 30 seconds, which is very important for field salespeople.” —Jorge Andres Echeverri Roa, Net Acquisition Manager | Marketing.
Results with Google Maps Platform
- DIRECTV increased the likelihood of closing a sale and improved process efficiency, saving time when loading information into the geographic platform it already uses.
- Increased sales team productivity: geographic information that previously took 3 minutes or more to load now takes only 30 seconds, improving the required visualization.
- Enables knowledge creation from the information displayed through the Maps JavaScript API.
Google Maps Platform products used
- Maps JavaScript API: Enables display of the map itself. Through this API, salespeople can view any sales information results obtained through the Google Maps APIs we choose to implement.
- Street View API: Embeds real images with 360-degree panoramas, improving the user experience and saving travel costs for sales teams.
- Autocomplete (Places API): offers predictions based on the search location, anticipating the full address before it is entered. This address and/or point-of-interest validation system reduces typing errors and, as a result, search abandonment.
- Directions API: Calculates the distance and travel time from point A to point B and shows optimal travel directions for field sales teams.
Move services to Google Cloud to improve the sales process
One of DIRECTV's main needs was to georeference the coverage areas of its internet service. Using Google Cloud Platform tools, Servinformación, a Google partner and Colombian company specializing in geographic information systems, created an app to georeference customers and coverage areas, displaying the processed information on Google Maps. Later, it created another app to validate internet coverage, enriching the databases and improving customer service.
“With DIRECTV, we focused on developing a solution to improve a tool's performance. We worked on all aspects of infrastructure as a service and databases. There is a backend, a frontend, and Android mobile applications through which the entire sales force interacts with these cloud services, and we combined the Google Maps component, giving us the full power of Google Cloud Platform,” says Luis Manuel Faviani, Manager at Servinformación.
The solutions created by Servinformación had a positive impact on the work of nearly 2,000 sales advisers operating throughout Colombia.
“They needed to know in real time whether an interested customer had coverage and whether they could sell them internet service, either because the customer was in a georeferenced area or because capacity was available to serve them. This had to happen quickly because it meant winning or losing the sale.”
—Jorge Andres Echeverri Roa, Net Acquisition Manager | Marketing.
This type of query was previously made through a URL, which took considerable time to tell the adviser whether they could offer the service to the prospective customer.
“In the previous implementation, queries or deployments for field advisers took a considerable amount of time, 10 or 15 minutes. Now, with the current configuration and deployment, updates for the sales team are being delivered in around 45 seconds,” Jorge Andrés Echeverri Roa, Net Acquisition Manager | Marketing.
