Customers

The aim of the Group is to ensure an immediate and effective response to customer requirements, modelling their conduct on business propriety, transparency in contractual relations and undertakings, courtesy and collaboration, ensuring customer focus and in full compliance with the principles established by company procedures. Cooperation with consumer associations, which includes entering into specific agreements with them, is also highly valued.

The relevant stakeholders are:

• consumer customers, particularly customers with special needs (the disabled, the elderly, children, etc.);
• business customers and local government offices;
• consumer associations.

[G4-DMA Product and Service Labelling] In recent years the telecommunications market has changed profoundly following digitisation and the increased capacity for choice consumers have in an ever more dynamic market.
The experience gained in comparison with the offer of different sectors, made more accessible to different categories of customers, also thanks to the spread of digital channels, increases customers’ expectations and guides the construction of the perceived quality of the service, the relationship with the brands and the resulting behaviours. This is changing the business models and the operating procedures of telecommunications operators.
In this context an understanding of customers’ expectations and the Customer Experience appraisal represent a strategic factor in the offer of services, making it possible to identify which aspects need to be worked on for an improved service, to the benefit of economic sustainability, loyalty and positive word of mouth. In order to understand and measure customer expectations, the Company has developed an extensive system of listening in order to detect Customer Satisfaction and the Customer Experience at different moments of interaction with the company: web browsing, purchasing a service, calling customer care, reporting a fault, and posts on social networks are all important aspects of the relationship with customers monitored for continuous improvement.

[G4-PR5] Activities that involve listening to the customer, which are always evolving, are broken down into different types of surveys to uncover the customer’s experience at different times during the customer journey and monitor the quality indicators.

The research includes the monitoring of the Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) - which adopts international standards (ACSI, American Customer Satisfaction Index) - to detect the quality perceived by customers and for competitors. The CSI result of 2016 relative to Consumer customers recorded a slight downturn compared to 2015 (-1,9%)1 but its values were still very high. The strong ties customers demonstrated with respect to the Group are also seen in the high propensity to loyalty, in an increasingly competitive context where the consumer’s experience is enriched through comparison with different markets.
Monitoring the CSI has earned certification of conformity with standard UNI 11098:2003 and has been included in the managerial incentive system (management by objectives).

TIMhas also adopted new methods of listening with a view to Customer Experience Management (CEM) in order to better understand the customer experience and obtain indications to improve processes, also permitting the so-called “close the loop” with the taking charge of and resolution of the reports collected from customers. TIM’s ever greater focus on “continuous improvement” to improve processes and the Customer Experience is confirmed by the results of the Net Promoter Score (NPS)¹ collected from customers who spoke with the telephone assistance service and that are confirmed to be extremely positive (NPS above 10). Projects developed by the Company to improve the Customer Experience and make employees play an active part in developing innovative, effective solutions, include:

• “Customer Journey Lab”: the project aims to allow colleagues/investigators to experience the service received by consumer customers first-hand by selecting, purchasing, activating and using services, so as to identify the customer’s perception and the main areas requiring attention/strengths;
• “Chi-ama TIM”: a tool used by TIM employees to channel reports received from customers, friends or acquaintances regarding the fixed line service requirements of consumer customers, of a commercial or technical nature. The project makes employees active participants as the promoters of solutions in the management of customers;
• “Listening to Customer Care operators,” launched to collect the requests and problems experienced by customers in listening to Customer Care operators, enhances the experience of those in day-to-day contact with the customers and who have in-depth knowledge of their needs and expectations, as a further contribution to the identification of opportunities to improve the customer Experience in using the Group services.

Confirming its commitment to quality of service and transparency in its relations with customers, TIM Brasil is the first Latin American company to have launched a “Portas Abertas” (open doors) website in 2013, showing the plans for expansion of the technical network. Among other things, the website offers customers the chance to:

• interact with the company regarding the technical network coverage map for each individual street;
• receive notifications regarding both maintenance and any failures to achieve technical network objectives;
• provide TIM with feedback on the perceived quality of the network.

Among the actions taken in 2016, it is worth highlighting the launch of the online chat service (available on the Web and via the TIM mobile app for smart phones), the improvement in several automatic and digital portal services, the humanisation of caring on digital channels in general, the creation of an online (web chat) channel for customers with questions about Anatel (Brazilian National Telecommunications Agency).
TIM Brasil also talks to its customers via Twitter and Facebook. @ TIMBrasil” (https://twitter. com/TIMBrasil), which as of December 2016 had more than 736,000 followers, and Facebook (www.facebook.com/timbrasil) with over 1,834.000 likers.
Since 2012, the company has also activated a further channel “@ TIM_AJUDA” (https://twitter.com/TIM_AJUDA), which allows it to communicate with customers via Twitter. As of December 2016 this channelhas almost 259,000 followers. As part of the development of customer services, a new version of the MEU TIM (My TIM) app was launched in May 2016 for customers who want to have information always available on their smart phone, including consumption, the latest bills, the remaining balance and current promotions. This app has been accessed over four million times a month. Furthermore, the “Seu de Verdade” (Really Yours) campaign launched at the end of October 2016, which ended in December 2016, was very well received, with 1.5 million unique users and 1.2 million logins to the app in the month of December alone.
TIM Brasil carries out two types of nation-wide customer satisfaction surveys by means of interviews:

• the TIM and competitors’ consumer customer survey, conducted twice a year (May and November) on a “reflective” basis, measures the customer’s general perception of the Company e.g. sales structure, call centre, network coverage and quality of the network (also as regards the Internet connection), technical support, the price of services, promotions, billing;
• the call centres survey, conducted once a month on a “reactive” basis, with the involvement of TIM customers (consumer and business) who have contacted the call centre in the previous 15 days.

Since 2012, in full compliance with privacy protection requirements, TIM has been monitoring “conversations” on the Web regarding quality in the Telecommunications sector, relating to both fixed and mobile communication and the consumer and business segments. This monitoring takes place using a tool that performs a semantic search and analysis of the subjects most frequently discussed on the Internet and analyses the “tone” (web sentiment) of conversations about TIM and its competitors. The aim is to make a prompt assessment of how customers perceive offers and services, gaining a greater insight into issues to support the business.

Use of social networking in customer care

In recent years, the Customer Relationship Management of the Group has been increasingly focused on the monitoring of new digital contexts, identifying the future of assistance, care and loyalty of its customers in the monitoring and management of caring contacts obtained from the social networks (Twitter and Facebook). In 2010, the Company launched the Caring on Social Media project to make the most of the opportunities provided by the new web communication channels. Over the years TIM has built a new relationship with digital mobile and fixed telephony customers in order to strengthen their trust, based on the re-engineering and reviewing of the processes, the development of management systems, the extension of monitoring times and investments in the training of social caring agents. In 2015 the Company launched the integration of the Telecom Italia and TIM Facebook pages into the single official TIM page, which boasts two million fans, offering a single business vision, generating positive sentiments towards the brand and creating a single point of reference for fixed/mobile customers. In 2016 the Company continued its work of reviewing the offer of social caring through the definition of organizational actions and a new model for managing reports from social networks, seeking to improve the service levels and monitor the social channel 24 hours a day; after launch an ad hoc survey is planned designed to detect customer satisfaction.

In 2016, TIM’s social caring department handled 864K caring interactions on the Facebook page and 220K on Twitter, with an upwards trend over the course of the year (in particular, in total the customer caring requests were made up of 745K from mobile phones and 339K from landlines); TIM continues to be the most followed in Italy in terms of the number of fans and followers. Moreover, in the telecommunications industry rankings monitored by Socialbakers, the official TIM page came first for customer service on Facebook in December 2016, with a response time of eight minutes and a response rate of 99% of posts published on the page; the parameter is calculated considering the ratio between the number of public posts handled and the response time by the Brand over 24 hours (indicator AMUQ²). In 2016 TIM renewed its primary role on the social networks confirming its digital leadership in the rankings for the third quarter of 2016, produced by Socialbaker, respectively coming in as fourth brand worldwide and first brand in Italy. Significant results were seen in terms of engagement and the number of new followers TIM acquired on Twitter during the #SocialParty, an event organized by TIM to launch the new logo.

The initiatives designed to promote connectivity and social innovation also proved to be important, such as the exclusive collaboration with the Civil Protection Department which sees TIM in the front row engaging influencers or promoting specific education in the event of environmental emergencies, in order to help - through the network – improve the timing and distribution of information useful to the population. This has enabled TIM to consolidate its leadership in the various communities that have been created in the different social networks (facebook, twitter, google+, instagram, youtube) around its main brands: TIM, TIM Impresa Semplice, TIMvision, TIMmusic, Working Capital, Serie A TIM, Nuvola Italiana, with more than eight million likers and followers.

Involvement of call centre operators

In 2016 all the preparatory activities to carry out the porting of all the content from the mini-sites of the TUO portal (acronym of Trova, Usa e Organizza [Find, Use and Organise] an information tool available to all call centre operators to fulfil the needs of customers as effectively as possible) to the new Drupal platform were performed in order to ensure technological adaptation aimed at improving the efficiency of the solution, which makes the most of the consolidated and much appreciated usability of the interface.

Moreover, the portal always provides the search engine solution of Google Search Appliance, Google’s solution for websites which replicates, in these environments, the speed and accuracy performances that the search engine offers on the web in order to make it simpler, thanks to innovations made by Google, to search for the content featured on the platform (hereby reducing the stress suffered by the operators of 187 and 119 call centres) and as a consequence increasing the perception of competence in providing answers to customers.

¹ The Net Promoter Score (NPS), an indicator founded on international standards and used in different industrial sectors, is based on the likelihood of recommending the operator in relation to the experience had. On a scale of 0 to 10, “promoters” are customers expressing votes of 9 or 10 “detractors” are those providing a score of 0 to 6, whereas the rest of the customers are considered as “passive” and are not countered towards calculating the NPS. The indicator is calculated as the difference between the percentages of “promoters” and “detractors.

² Answered Minus Unanswerd Questions.