Yesterday Orange Romania organized in Bucharest the first Romanian edition of The International Ideas Festival, an event that is in its third edition within the Orange France-Telecom group. The International Ideas Festival is an event in which the best ideas of Orange employees from 10 countries around the world, proposed as part of the Orange Ideas Exchange program, are presented, appreciated and awarded by local and international Orange employees, but also by to the persons invited to the location. All the ideas presented during the event are conceived, developed and sometimes already applied by Orange employees, and those that are good enough, but not yet applied, can be financed by Orange and can be used either locally or internationally .
At the Romanian edition of The International Idea Festival, 39 ideas of Orange employees from: Romania, Spain, Egypt, Jordan, France, Belgium, Poland, Russia and Slovakia participated, and 6 of them were awarded based on the votes cast during the event. since yesterday. The ideas present at the event were divided into several categories, and for each of them a winner was chosen and in the list below you have the winners plus a brief presentation of their idea:
- Vox Populi – Orange Kids Lab Russia – The idea is to organize technical, scientific and engineering laboratories for our children. We can become the first company to organize an international network of technical laboratories for our children, and this way also prove our social orientation.
- Customer Category – Visual IVR Application to talk instantly to the Customer Service Agent – Enable customers to talk instantly to the correct Customer Service agent by using the Visual IVR application on their Smartphone rather than listening to an Audio IVR.
- Network Category – VPN Access Failures? Not with your safety check! – A module to check the connection paths between customer and backbone equipment to detect the lack of real redundancy.
- People Category – Automated churn cost calculator to help Call Center Agents - Development of automated churn cost calculator IT solution to help Customer Care Agents in calculating churn fees and also reducing by 20% the AHT of resolution cases.
- Patent – Orange Soft Phone – Orange Soft phone enables customers to make and receive calls on any device (TV, Mac PC, tablet) connected to their LIVEBOX.
- Best implementation – Orange Extra Number - Extra number is a service that allows customers to order additional numbers to a current main number.
Of all the ideas present there, a few seemed suitable to be presented here, and below I will talk a little about them.
TweetFinity is an application developed by Orange Egypt, and with its help you can write more on Twitter. You will probably think that there are already services like Tweetlonger that offer such functionality, that's what I thought too, but the people from Orange have a different vision. Instead of making a website to display longer tweets, they made an application that shares your text and publishes it in the form of several numbered tweets, so that anyone reading your feed can understand what you're saying. Tweetlonger publishes part of the message and redirects users to another website to read the whole thing, but TweetFinity publishes the entire message on Twitter, but in the form of several successive tweets. I think the idea comes from sharing SMS messages when the texts are too long and I think it's good, but it will probably generate some confusion among users. TweetFinity will someday be available in the App Store and at that time I will let you know.
Orange La Multi Ani is another interesting project of those from Orange, the company planning to offer promotional vouchers to users celebrating their birthday. Now you receive minutes on your birthday, soon you will also receive a voucher that allows you to buy products from the Orange online store, and each voucher will be usable only online and its value will be calculated according to your invoices from the last months. The idea is not bad, Orange hopes to increase sales in this way and more than likely it will.
Finally, I leave an idea of the Orange employees in Poland, they are implementing there a discussion forum for users who have problems with the terminals bought from the operator. The idea was to give users the opportunity to help each other before actually calling the operator to solve a problem, and in a single year 20.000 cases were solved in this way. Orange employees moderate the discussions and intervene only when necessary, and everything that is done reduces the traffic of the Call Centers.
The event was interesting, it was thought to mainly offer business solutions for Orange or other companies, it did not have many ideas specifically thought for consumers and I think this should be taken into account for the future. In San Francisco, Orange Labs develops commercial projects, which can be used by other users besides orange clients, not only by companies, and it would be interesting to see other similar events, but also focused on users. I'm glad to see that events are organized in Romania where ideas are appreciated and rewarded, and in the future I can only hope that such presentations will become as normal as the rest of the things we see in everyday life.
