Cell C Limited (stylised as Cell ©) is South Africa’s third largest mobile company. Cell C’s range of products and services are supported by its network which offers 2G, 3G and LTE services and covers 98% of South Africa’s population; the company has a roaming agreement in place with Vodacom to provide 2G and 3G services to customers in outlying areas.
The network coverage map on the public website (https://www.cellc.co.za) is an important tool to inform consumers and businesses about the availability of Cell C across South Africa. Ideally the user should spend the minimum time on the coverage map to establish availability of services and get to the order page as soon as possible. In order to achieve this, the key requirements are:
Speed of the coverage map solution to get the customer to buy
Accuracy of the address lookup technology (can I find my address, business, etc)
Accuracy and freshness of the underlying data provider datasets used on the map
The worst case scenario for Cell C is when they sign up a customer based on the coverage data on the website, only later to come back to the customer if the order cannot be fulfilled by the service provider.
The best measure of success for the coverage map is the increase in users signing up for Cell C services as well as the reduction in orders rejected by service providers. Unfortunately we don't have numbers to back up any one of these but hopefully the customer would be willing to share some insight.
28East provides a fully managed service to Cell C for this application (https://www.cellc.co.za/cellc/coverage-map). Important to note that Cell C provides some of their own products to end customers (e.g. LTE) but then they also resell various fibre providers products under their own brand (C-Fibre).
This includes sourcing of the base data in various formats from all the various providers, ingesting it into our backend database and fusing it into a single layer which we use for display on the map and a coverage checker web service that can be used independently from the map. We update the data on a weekly basis to ensure that users of the application can be linked to the correct product available at their location.
We make use of various Google Maps APIs in the application, e.g. JS Maps, Geocoding, Autocomplete.
Key value add: lead generation machine
- connect the user to the right product
- reduced rejection of orders placed (key benefit)
- superior user experience
The project is run entirely in Google Cloud Platform, including billing.