When Telekom Srbija expanded its GPRS network, the number of GPRS phones using it increased as did the number of calls for configuration support. In Serbia, it is very popular to upgrade your mobile phone two or three times a year.
Miloš Selić, head of Customer Care at Telekom Srbija, says that his call center operators were wasting too much time dictating the different GPRS settings, with some calls lasting more than 20 minutes.
Offloading customer care and encouraging the use of premium services were two of the reasons behind Telekom Srbija's decision to introduce a solution for automatically configuring new devices on their network.
In February 2006 Ericsson implemented Automatic Device Configuration (ADC), which automatically senses the need to send the configuration settings to a new phone, enabling it to use data services such as WAP browsing and MMS.
ADC has sent nearly 10 million new configuration settings and 3 million welcome messages since the service began operating.
The results were immediate - before ADC Telekom Srbija's Customer Care could respond to only about 45 percent of incoming calls. After ADC, call agents spent less time with configuration requests and were able to respond to more than 80 percent of all calls. Today that figure is closer to 95 percent.
"In Serbia mobile customers want to get their phone with all the settings already set up, so the main benefit of ADC for our subscribers is customer satisfaction," Selić says.
With the burden of configuration support significantly decreased, operators are also able to spend more time on sales-oriented calls.
"We have experienced great growth in both GPRS and MMS traffic as well," he says. When ADC was installed in January 2006, a maximum of 9000 MMS messages were sent per day. Since then MMS traffic has increased significantly - around 30 percent every three months. In August 2007, 54 467 MMS messages were sent during a single day.
"In the future, we will increase the services available from GPRS. The most important thing is that the users' phones are ready for these services," says Selić. In addition to supporting GPRS, ADC is being used to configure 3G devices.
Telekom Srbija was the first operator in Serbia to launch 3G services. With approximately 5 million customers, it is also the largest telecom service provider in the country.
