Telecommunications

The right gesture

The OneContact solution processes her video call and the answer arrives in real time.

It’s true that happiness means different things to different people. But not always.

Take Isabel. As she can’t hear or speak, she’s different from the majority. But when it comesto what makes her happy, she’s the same as everyone else: she wants to communicate, interact and have an active and integrated life. With so many people with special needs, Isabel knows how to find alternatives. If she can’t use her voice she uses gestures. When she can’t use gestures, she writes. But it makes her happy when someone worries about making her life easier. Such as a big telecommunications operator, that integrated Portuguese Sign Language into their contact centre. Now, when she wants to talk to the brand, Isabel no longer needs a friend as an interpreter.

She doesn’t have to wait for e-mails nor give explanations to people who don’t know what her day-to-day is like.

All she needs is her Smartphone.

At the other end, the assistants who are fluent in sign language were trained by the operator and by the Portuguese Association for the Deaf that adapted all the contact centre’s procedures and even created new gestures to translate telecommunication terms.

Isabel’s vocabulary expanded – but her independence and sense of belonging expanded even more.

Supported by OneContact technology,

this is a project with impact on the life of about 900,000 people with special needs. People whose life became a little bit better – and who appreciate the gesture.

Happiness can’t wait

Yussef was over the moon: the mobile phone was awesome.

His father had been promising it for ages. If the exams went well…

They went very well indeed, and now Yussef was finding it difficult to control himself. He had scribbled his best friend’s number on his hand – he was going to surprise him.

But who was surprised was Yussef himself: the call would have to wait. According to the man in the shop, the government had started to demand the identification of all SIM card holders, for security reasons. A contract would have to be signed and sent by plane to India to be introduced into the system. Yussef would only be able to make his call in 30 days.

30 days! He went back home distraught. That afternoon, however, the man from the shop called his father. They should go back the following day, he said. “We’re going to tear up that piece of paper and do everything all over again”.

“Doing everything all over again” was fast: an identity card was photographed using a tablet and that was it.

The aeroplane was no longer necessary: seconds later the document’s data were on the server.

Yussef, of course, didn’t need to know that the application that made the process so simple was developed by Novabase. Nor that in addition to simplifying the registration, the solution provided the telecommunications operator with the complete picture of the sales channel, which it previously didn’t have: everything that was going on with the transactions, the pipeline, the stocks – practically in real time.

Yussef just wanted to know one thing: when he couldcall. “Tomorrow” responded the man at the shop.

And, at that very day, there was no happier smile in the whole Emirate.

You can’t go wrong

The activation of the service was too slow. Queuing and clients were getting impatient. “At Christmas, when we’re busier”, thought Luisa, “what’s going to happen?”What happened was that she was informed of the new platform. “Is it being installed?” she asked. “That means we’re going to spend a few hours with the system down…” They explained that wasn’t going to happen: it was all on the web, there was no installation. “And will we receive training?”

Christmas was just around the corner and Luísa, manager of a telecommunications shop, was apprehensive.

The brand had just launched its convergent offer, integrating land and mobile lines. It was such a success that the shop was having difficulties in meeting demand. Although it was an integrated model, the IT platform treated the two activations as separate operations. Crossed discounts, loyalty contracts, everything had to be integrated manually, with the employees having to stop, at times, to consult the information.