COMMUNICATIONS AND ENTERTAINMENT

CARIBBEAN/CENTRAL AMERICAN CELL PHONE OPERATOR -
 POS/Inventory Management/Cell phone activation

Background
Our client is the largest cell phone company in the Caribbean and Central America, operating in 1,700 locations in 34 countries in four languages. They have grown extremely rapidly, growing from zero to 11M subscribers since 2001.

The Challenge
Their in-store retail systems could not keep up with the company’s rapid growth. Managing inventory was becoming a growing problem. It took far too long to activate a new cell phone, which displeased customers. Network communication quality varied considerably by country, making it difficult to run a centralized retail system. Staff turnover was high, which meant that staff often were not properly trained.

The Solution
VisionMAX built a Point of Sale (POS), Inventory Management, and cell phone activation system, based on retail software frameworks previously developed for other retail clients. The store system requires very little bandwidth to communicate to the company’s central datacenter, and can operate in offline mode (accumulating transactions) until connectivity is reestablished. The system has stringent inventory controls to improve management of inventory. VisionMAX built interfaces to our client’s suppliers that permitted telephone switches to activate new cell phones in minutes. VisionMAX’s customer care division, CCF Interact, assisted the client in store POS deployment rollout services including  ongoing software support of the client applications including our Automated Agent Solution (which employed interactive video, text, quizzes and tests) to provide Help and Training services for staff.

The Results
Inventory management was significantly improved (increased inventory turns, reduced shrinkage). Cell phones can be activated and topped in a few minutes, rather than half an hour or longer. The online Help/Training videos turned what used to be a chore into entertainment learning, and store agents can now be trained online using interactive video training modules with integrated tests, quizzes and scoring, all monitored by management.

Realizing the benefits of standardizing the sales and inventory management processes across the organization with the new features of the system, our client accelerated rollout across their multi-nation network of stores.