With 4.6 million customers, Swisscom Mobile is the market leader for mobile phone services in Switzerland. The company is constantly developing new products and services in order to continue to exceed customer expectations and outshine the competition.
In a dynamic, rapidly evolving market such as mobile communications, companies are finding that traditional development cycles take too long and cost too much. Swisscom Mobile decided to take a different approach: to use customer feedback to change the way products are developed, tested, and brought to market. By making beta products available for downloading and evaluation, Swisscom Mobile would be able to tap into the expertise of users and receive valuable feedback quickly to impact new product decisions.
The result was the creation of Swisscom Mobile Labs (http://labs.swisscom-mobile.ch/), an innovative web platform and testing environment that allows Swisscom Mobile users to influence the way products are designed. Assembled by Optaros in only six weeks, the site enables Swisscom Mobile to engage its customers to help improve new products and bring them to market quickly. Swisscom Mobile Labs is an example of an Innovation Community — an environment aimed at accelerating product development while identifying features that customers prefer and are willing to pay for.
"The ability to post a beta product and have hundreds of power users respond with feedback in the next 72 hours is a huge advantage. It means we can bring better products to market faster—with a fresh perspective, and ideas we never would have come up with on our own," explains Felix Köppl, Product Manager at Swisscom Mobile.
Swisscom Mobile subscribers are notified by RSS feed when a new beta product is available for downloading and evaluation. Users can rate the new product, view aggregate ratings from other users, submit comments, suggest improvements, and discuss the offerings with their peers. The Ajax interface allows users to see the latest results immediately, without having to refresh the page.
The project began with an Optaros workshop to share ideas about how Swisscom Mobile could take advantage of Web 2.0 technology. Optaros assembled the Swisscom Mobile Labs web platform using its OptAM methodology that allows rapid assembly of web 2.0 solutions by integrating proven open source components. "We are very excited about the quality of the application and the speed in which the solution has been developed and put into production," observes Stefan Mauron, Head of Strategic Initiatives at Swisscom Mobile.
The assembly is based entirely on open source software, incorporating Web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax for interactive applications, Alfresco's repository content, and other frameworks and components. In addition to building the assembly, Optaros hosts the platform and provides support. As with the assembly components, all support tools are open source, including Nagios, RT, and Track.
Since going live in September 2006, visits and feedback have far exceeded expectations. More than 6,000 subscribers visited the site in the first month, and more than 500 users per day on average have visited since the site was launched. As anticipated, user feedback has made an impact. "Today we can launch new products much faster than previously possible," Köppl notes.
One of the first known Web 2.0 offerings in Switzerland, Swisscom Mobile Labs illustrates a new approach for developing, testing, and proliferating products and services while leveraging customer feedback. Optaros can deliver comprehensive Web 2.0 services for building a lively innovation community, from initial workshops to identify opportunities and business benefits, to recommending the right open source components, fast design and deployment, hosting, and ongoing support.
"Developing a new product has always carried an element of risk," concludes Swisscom Mobile's Felix Köppl. "Will subscribers embrace it? Does it have the features they want? Will they recommend it to their friends? Now we're able to drive out the uncertainly so when a new product is ready for launch, we know we have a winner."