Customer Self-Service Telecom Portal for Mobile Operators

Business challenge

Our client is a multinational corporation that helps Tier 1 telecom operators through digital and network transformation by providing a broad suite of market-leading offerings and exceptional customer service in telecom industry. When our client acquired a communications technology firm in the Middle East, it became evident that they needed to rapidly ramp up engineering resources. In order to merge the firm with their corporation, our client needed to upgrade the acquired company’s outdated systems to bring them in sync with their own innovative solutions.

The acquired company’s legacy infrastructure wasn’t adapted to meet growing market demands for interoperability and integration. The entire system was based on obsolete technologies and the user interface, in particular, was developed using a proprietary framework. This resulted in the need to rework many solutions to integrate them with our client’s advanced microservices-based systems for easy onboarding of customers from the acquired company. To add to the challenge, a lack of access to servers and development environments hugely complicated system integration at the technical level.

Our main task was to build a user portal that provides personal accounts to newly onboarded mobile operators and integrate this portal with their systems and equipment. To help accelerate and accomplish that goal, Intellias committed to providing our client with qualified engineering teams that would build the development process and create a custom self-care portal telecom providers could benefit from. Our previous successful experience building telecom software systems of the same nature and scale paved the way for a positive outcome.

Solution delivered

We worked to integrate our client’s core systems and databases with their new customers’ solutions and infrastructures. To cover our client’s pressing needs, we worked in several directions simultaneously:

Setting up the integration process

Since the merging of our client’s organization with the acquired company had just started, there were no operational processes in place. To ensure a smooth transition, our team established key development workflows and introduced a set of communication and documentation processes.

From the infrastructure perspective, Intellias provided a range of solution operations services to build an effective integration and production environment. Our engineers spun up a network of virtual machines on the client side, reduced the number of system bottlenecks, and automated deployment and testing.

Each of our four teams, guided by a Scrum Master and a technical lead, was responsible for building their development process in the most efficient way possible by taking into account the context of all parties involved. Our engineers suggested a lot of process solutions that were implemented across the entire project.

Transferring knowledge

Given the distributed knowledge base across multiple teams and locations, our client hosted a series of knowledge-sharing sessions on a proprietary UI development framework used for the project.

Our team took the initiative to rebuild our client’s training process to make it more informative and beneficial. We started mapping plans for specific cases, recorded videos, collected questions, and grouped them under categories. Any issues we ran into were discussed at our cross-team meetings and workshops. At the same time, we accumulated and systematized the company’s experience and created a single, consolidated knowledge base that became a valuable resource and point of reference for our client’s engineering teams.

The outcome of this knowledge transfer was quality coding, fast feature implementation, and informed problem-solving provided by our teams.

Intellias deliverables

Our cooperation evolved fast: four feature teams quickly grew to eight frontend and backend teams each working on their own tasks:

• User portal development and integration

The user portal serves as a link between our client’s system and mobile operators’ systems. The portal allows users to set up their services and view service reports.

• Data processing and report building

Reporting functionality aggregates our clients’ data with operators’ data and provides client-side data visualization. The system generates user reports based on calls made and services used.

• Billing system integration

We integrated a billing solution into the end customer’s OSS/BSS ecosystem, providing users with information on account movements and current balances.

• UI/UX implementation

We created a new interface for the self-service user portal to make it user-friendly and easy to navigate.

• Refinement and refactoring

In addition to implementing new features, our engineers were in charge of refactoring code on the client’s system to improve and optimize its performance.

• Bug fixing and L3 support

As Intellias teams successfully delivered on their commitments, our client entrusted us to help with system debugging of their global network.

Business outcome

With access to a vast tech talent pool, Intellias swiftly responded to our client’s business goals by assembling eight mature engineering teams within a short time. As a result, we helped our client minimize costs while receiving top-quality software engineering services and covering a large number of development tasks.

Intellias proved a reliable integrator partner by refactoring, customizing, and building on existing solutions, developing new functionalities, and integrating them into our client’s network. We provided the necessary infrastructure to speed up production and established development workflows and best practices, taking the whole integration process to a new level. The self-care portal we built and integrated supports mobile operators in providing top-notch customer service in telecommunications industry.

Significantly, our team managed to find synergy within our client’s distributed organization and gathered a unique knowledge base, incorporating years of expert experience provided by the company’s key knowledge keepers. This knowledge base serves as the basis for further product development as well as our client’s training initiatives.