Deutsche Telekom, one of the world’s leading telecommunication providers serves more than 90m customers in Europe alone. In the age of rapidly shifting customer needs and overall disruption taking place – such as silicon valley companies like Whatsapp chipping away revenues – the company decided to elevate it’s digital customer experience to a new level. A key piece of this effort was a new mobile first self-service app with a unified experience across countries. However each country was slightly unique in terms of product portfolio, IT infrastructure and regulation – just to name a few. It was clear from the beginning that providing a great experience to customers would require a very careful balance between general customer journeys and delicate customization to local needs.

The most crucial element of the planning was deciding on the approach. Each country needed to manage their own apps so Deutsche Telekom choose the multiple app, one code base solution. To meet the challenges Supercharge’s team proposed a technical approach based on widely accepted practices of Open Sourcing. We created a component-based, modularised, layered architecture for a core application. This core application became an “Enterprise Open Source” project accessible to any team at the company and any 3rd party chosen by the company. Building on this project the internal and externals team were able to quickly roll out customized, country specific applications while maintaining the integrity of the unified customer experience and the underlying code base.

The approach came with 3 very distinct advantages.

Unified but flexible: Deutsche Telekom was able to offer a truly unified experience to customers – while paying attention to local needs. This was clearly well received by customers as the apps in some countries started showing above 4.5/5 customer reviews.

Decreased time to market: Another key development was that the rollout across countries picked up pace very significantly. Within 12 months of starting the development apps for 3 countries – Romania, Montenegro and Croatia – were launched out. And the pace picked up even more right after as the core project was utilized by various development teams across countries.

Cheap to repeat: Last but not least there was a very significant saving on the development cost as up to 80% of the code base could be shared across the applications. The use of the default journeys, the UI library and the general features allowed developers to move fast and avoid spending time on features already used by other teams. On top of that any enhancements or fixes were contributed back to the code base resulting in even more savings in the long run.

As of today millions Deutsche Telekom customers across Europe use this application as their primary point of contact with the company.