Swisscom: Dialing up an innovative store locator solution with Google Maps Platform

Enter a Swisscom store in Geneva, Zurich, or a remote Alpine town and you’re likely to be greeted by a floor manager in a sleek space with digital screens, trendy exposed brick walls, and workstations where product tutorials are held.

Swisscom has a network of 116 such stores around ultra-modern Switzerland, and it takes pride in meeting customer needs with outstanding service and shopping experiences. In a digital age where ecommerce is transforming retail, Swisscom believes that the human touch and tangible products in physical stores are more relevant than ever.

It’s a conviction backed up by plenty of research: “Despite the notion of the demise of brick-and-mortar stores, physical retail isn't dead, boring retail is,” consultancy KPMG said last year, adding that as of January 2019, 90% of all retail would still be done in physical stores.

The smartest companies, however, know the power of great stores comes fully to life through digital technologies that engage consumers before they visit a store. That’s why Swisscom turned to Google Maps Platform and Maplicate, a Google Maps Premier Partner, to help build an innovative store locator. The previous solution no longer met the standards of Swisscom’s state-of-the-art physical stores, and the company was ready for change.

“A great store experience starts long before you actually enter a store,” says Rolf Jeker, Senior Solutions Designer at Swisscom. “So a big part of our mission is to inspire customers and offer them the best customer experience anytime, anywhere. The whole experience has become much more exciting for customers since deploying Google Maps Platform.”

Enhancing the consumer retail journey

Swisscom already knew that investment in physical stores can go to waste if customers have trouble finding them. But the team soon realized there was much more to a great locator solution than simply pointing customers to the nearest store.

To be truly outstanding, the solution needed to provide an intuitive user interface, the best routes, and offer services such as online appointment bookings. Critically, it had to keep the consumer on the website during navigation, to stop them being lured away to competitors by ads.

“The store locator was a first step to enhance our omnichannel experience, with a focus shared between the online and retail channel,” explains Amar Catic, Sales Strategy Manager at Swisscom. “It’s an important milestone that enables the embedment of further online capabilities in favor of our clients.”

Swisscom worked closely with Maplicate and Google Cloud to achieve its mission of creating a state-of-the-art locator that enables an end-to-end shopping experience, beginning with a consumer’s smartphone and ending at the checkout of a Swisscom store.

“With our previous situation, our standalone solution couldn't be integrated into the website itself,” Rolf recalls. “It was outdated and no longer met our needs, so we decided to collaborate with Maplicate as a perfect partner for the Google Maps Platform solution.”

Swisscom’s original solution was already based on Google Maps. But the Google team’s personalized guidance based on the Google Gold Standard for Maps integration, developed over years of experience creating global solutions, enabled it to integrate specific Google Maps Platform APIs to meet specific Swisscom requirements. In particular, creative execution of APIs and services such as the Maps JavaScript API, Directions API, Distance Matrix API, Geocoding API, Places API, Place Details, and Place Autocomplete were instrumental to launch the new Swisscom solution.

The result? Since the new version launched, 50% of all online appointment bookings are made through the store locator website, which now sees 40,000 visits per month. “With this Google Maps-powered solution,” says Amar, “we are seeing more customers have a great omnichannel experience, and we believe this helps lead to more customer satisfaction and increased sales.”

Continuous evolution of digitally powered physical retail

One of the key aspects of the collaboration is that Swisscom’s store locator is now a constantly evolving platform. Working with Maplicate’s OmniChannel Cloud solution, which is based on Google Maps Platform and Google Cloud, Swisscom can regularly add new features as well as request immediate support in case of trouble.

“The nimbleness and flexibility in evolving the solution was probably the main reason for deciding to build the platform with Google Maps Platform and Maplicate,” says Rolf. “With this new shop locator, we’re enabled to manage all Swisscom shops, including comments, photos, description, and ownership within one easy back end. The implementation of these functions is the next milestone."

Looking ahead, Swisscom’s next goal is to optimize and develop more online capabilities to meet customer expectations. The company believes this will help to set a new benchmark for the omnichannel experience in favor of its customers.

The pleasures of store shopping today are underpinned by digital solutions. And these synergies are built on strong partnerships such as the ones Swisscom has forged while building its innovative new store locator.