Enterprise IT services for a mobile operator

Itransition takes over the mobile operator’s software QA, maintenance and functionality development project to help life:) grow subscriber base and remarkably strengthen its positions on the market.

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Enterprise IT services for a mobile operator

Problem

Сustomer

Life:) is the third largest mobile operator in Belarus and a pioneer in 3G network mobile services in the country. Ever since its market entrance in 2008, the company initiated and has been successfully implementing far-reaching plans aimed at expanding and strengthening its positions on the market.

As a new brand, life:) had to come up with flawless technical service and fitly implemented customer offerings to win subscribers over and outperform its more mature competitors. Not willing to augment its in-house IT team, life:) engaged Itransition to meet their needs for custom software development and take over support and maintenance of the existing company’s software systems from the previous software development contractor.

Solution

Scope of Work

Itransition worked with both life:)’s front-office and back-office systems. Automation of the following business processes was supported:

Operations at dealer outlets (CRM): signing contracts with new subscribers, selling equipment, etc.
Document management within the company
Statistics and report generation
Customer services support: USSD, SMS, services activation, calls, etc.
Integration with a payment system enabling money transfers.

Increasing Customer Satisfaction Level

The main focus was to support life:)’s existing customer service systems and extend their capabilities as required by regularly introduced promotional offerings. Itransition took care of the following systems:

USSD system – a set of services enabling requests to information menu, subscriber activation, tariff plan switching, etc.
Mobile operator’s system initiating billing requests, tariff switching requests, event SMS sending requests, etc.
Internet Customer Service (ICS) web portal
Customer services support: USSD, SMS, services activation, calls, etc.
Web service containing the principal business logic interacting with data sources.

Primary importance was given to timely elimination of any technical issues putting at risk customer satisfaction.

Catering to the Needs of life:) Employees

Itransition was also engaged to enhance the systems supporting operations at mobile operator’s dealer outlets:

Back-office system for managing customer subscription services
Document packages management and subscriber contracts printing software.

System Integration and Data Exchange

The systems and services under Itransition’s support and maintenance were integrated and exchanged data with a number of external systems:

Payment system enabling Internet banking services, bank transfers and other billing and payment operations
External personal data database to check validity of the provided ID details
Blacklisted customers databases – to ensure the prospective subscribers have no payment history troubles with other mobile operators
Life:) in-house databases.

All functionality implemented by Itransition — up to 30 promotional products/offerings a month — was deployed to the production environment right away, contributing to life:)’s customer base growth.

Engagement of Itransition’s QA, maintenance and support specialists enabled life:) to achieve a considerable decrease in technical glitches and overall systems stabilization. This resulted in increased customer satisfaction and operations refinement at mobile operator’s dealer outlets.

Process

Itransition’s dedicated team was comprised of business analysts, .NET developers, quality assurance engineers, technical support specialists, a team lead and a project manager. The dedicated team engagement model implied the Customer had maximum control over project resources assigned exclusively for their project.

Project Handover Impediments

The principal difficulty was posed by insufficient knowledge transfer during project handover from the previous vendor. Itransition was challenged to meet tough timeframes imposed by our Customer’s business needs, all in the absence of software documentation and testing environment.

Nevertheless, Itransition’s dedicated team managed to form an in-depth knowledge base all on their own and get going with project tasks. New functionality was developed according to thoroughly documented specifications provided by the Customer’s BA team.