Deutsche Telekom, one of the world’s leading telecommunication providers serves more than 90m customers in Europe alone.

In an age of rapidly shifting customer needs and overall disruption - such as Silicon Valley companies like WhatsApp chipping away at revenues - the company decided to elevate its 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 unique in terms of product portfolio, IT infrastructure and regulation–just to name a few aspects. 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.

Balancing needs while enhancing and unifying the customer experience

The most crucial element of the planning was deciding on the approach. Each country needed to manage their own apps, so Deutsche Telekom chose to go down the route of deploying multiple apps from a single codebase.

Supercharge’s team proposed a technical approach based on widely accepted Open Sourcing practices to meet the challenges. 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 in Deutsche Telekom and any third-party chosen by the company. 

The core applications acted as an advanced SDK (Software Development Kit), defining a highly scalable architecture, providing a universal UI Library to design unique screens and, most importantly, defining default user journeys for key functionalities. What’s more, the core app took the hassle out of building frequently required functionalities such as analytics, localisation, advanced security features and much more.

One solution to serve millions of customers across countries 

The approach came with three 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 review scores.
• Decreased time to market:
  Another key development was that the rollout across countries picked up pace significantly. Within 12 months of starting, the development apps for three countries were launched: Romania, Montenegro and Croatia. 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 were significant savings on development costs, as up to 80% of the codebase 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. Further, any enhancements or fixes were contributed back to the code base, resulting in even more savings in the long run.