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Oi, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Oi, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Company Description: Oi is the only provider of telecommunication services in Brazil and the only truly integrated company with a nationwide presence. The Company’s social purpose is to offer telecommunications services, operating in compliance with the concessions, authorizations and permits granted to the company. At the end of 2013 Oi had 74.5 million clients.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Turnaround of the Year

Nomination Title: The Oi Company´s prepaid recharge turnaround. Increasing the revenue to over than 1.500% in one year.

Tell the story about how your organization has improved its sales performance since the beginning of July 2013 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

At our company we have approximately 41 million prepaid customers. It is extremely important for us to guarantee different ways that these customers can do recharges. Credit card recharges always have been part of our strategy, as they are agile and practical, allowing customers to conciliate the recharge payment with the credit card due date.

In January 2014 we made only $305.183 in recharges, amount considered very low as we understood that there were yet several unexploited opportunities. Only one of our IVR platforms had a recharge option available at the main menu, and, from the infrastructure point of view, our system was undersized for the high call volume, which resulted in frequent outages. In January we started the credit card recharge turnaround project, with the objective to solve technical issues, create new recharge channels, review current processes and significantly increase recharges. Our project target was to increase recharges in 300% in a 12 month timeframe.

It took us 30 days to prepare the plan and in February we started implementing the actions. Every month we deployed important actions and, based on the reports from the previous month, we planned the necessary adjustments in order to eliminate mistakes and increase the recharge volume.

Between the actions that we took during the turnaround project we can mention:

1) Creation of a USSD channel allowing recharges via text messaging, providing a more agile way for customers to recharge at any time.

2) Allowing a secure way to conduct the registration of new credit cards via USSD with a PCI compliant solution.

3) Implementation of the recharge option in several other routines and in other high traffic IVRs, providing more contact points with the customer.

4) Deploying the Family and Friends recharge functionality in which the customer can enroll friends and relatives and do recharges for them paying with his own credit card.

5) Implemented a proactive approach at the IVR channel so customers that call the platform with balance around $0,00 listen to a recharge option before the main menu.

6) Review IVR messages and processes, making the instructions clear, avoiding incorrect data typing and making the purchase process quicker.

7) Eliminated unnecessary confirmation questions making the recharge process simpler and less prone to errors in USSD and IVR.

8) Creation of specific recharge short-codes for IVR (*3000) and USSD (*3000#) in such a way that customers don´t need to navigate in menus to reach the recharge option.

9) Servers were upgraded to support all required processing, without interruptions.

10) Improved the dissemination of the service and sent approximately 200 million SMS, encouraging customers to perform recharges with their credit cards via IVR and USSD.

11) Established a war-room for daily monitoring of indicators, verifying oscillations and analyzing the result of deployments.

12) Carrying out diagnosis of the root cause for all problems encountered during the project, fixing definitely any identified error.

Since March as result of our implemented actions we could verify monthly recharge increases as detailed below:

January: $305.183; February: $241.154; March: $429.110; April: $626.652; May: $1.036.124; June: $1.185.350; July: $1.595.687; August: $2.019.422; September: $2.573.268; October: $3.104.970.

As can be seen, we have already reached the goal of 300% increase in July, much sooner than December. In October reached more than 900% increase and we will finish the year with an increase of more than 1.600% (January to December), according to the projected data below:

November: $4.178.310 / December: $5.324.250.

We can summarize the project's success saying that in 2013 we sold $4.035.467, in 2014, with the project action we will sell $22.619.277 (+461%) and in 2015, we estimate sales in order of $63.891.005,00 (+1.483%).

For all the planning done, the successful implementation of the actions and the excellent results achieved, we would be honored to receive the title of Sales Turnaround of the Year at the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service in 2015.

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