Telekom Srbija, as the company that officially has the best mobile network and an impressive number of households that are able to connect to the optical network, provides its clients with all the prerequisites they need for quality work from any location
Our example has shown how important technological investments are, but also a commitment to improving operations through standardisation and certification, especially in the field of service management and maintaining business continuity, explains Telekom Srbija’s Nikola Matović.
What are the greatet challenges that were faced by the telecommunications sector during the COVID-19 epidemic?
The main challenge and goal of all of us is to preserve human health. Only when we succeed in that can we talk about other challenges. Unlike many branches of industry, which experienced a complete standstill in just a few days, telecommunications companies had a guaranteed job. No one was completely ready for a mass transition to working from home in a very short period of time, because the probability of such a thing was small, until it became an overnight reality. That’s why I’m positively surprised by research showing that, on average, companies organised work from home up to forty times faster than could have been expected prior to the pandemic.
How has the mass transferral to work from home impacted on your sector and the type of services that have appeared in your offer and among the competition?
The workplace has definitely transformed, in some respects probably forever. The quality of internet connection in our homes has become a very important topic for each of us, and the expectations of users are very high with regard to the quality of service we provide them with today.
By switching to remote working, increasing the use of collaboration tools and video conferencing, and increasing the amount of documents exchanged, users were able to better compare the quality of our services with those of other providers. They were also able to quickly assess whether the characteristics of the services they had previously used still met their needs, and if the overall quality was only impacted by the “speed” of uploading/downloading, the amount of gigabytes available (in the case of mobile internet) or whether there are other existing parameters that significantly influence quality, such as availability or latency.
High-quality internet was the dominant demand of our users even before the pandemic, and that trend only multiplied during the pandemic
Which of your services for business are most in demand? In which areas have companies sought your support the most?
High-quality internet was the dominant demand of our users even before the pandemic, and that trend has since multiplied. We have recorded much higher demand for mobile internet, so we responded to market demands through packages with a large amount of gigabytes and mobile modems, and all at a very affordable price.
In the area of cloud services, our virtual server packages have experienced a real expansion, along with requests for collaboration and office software tools. The expansion of the use of cloud solutions from this domain (Teams, Zoom, etc.) has shown how important it is to have local support. When global services are at a standstill, there is little you can do other than wait for the problem to be resolved. In many cases, during the pandemic we offered the local support that we provide independently or in cooperation with partners free of charge, and a large number of requests for support related to remote access services, IPSec connections and the like.