Case study
UST's microservices modernization initiative helped the wireless services company improved responsiveness to customer demands by 50%
OUR CLIENT
This telecommunications company was founded nearly 30 years ago after a series of mergers and corporate restructuring initiatives. Today, the company provides wireless services across North America with more than 70,000 employees serving nearly 115 million customers.
THE CHALLENGE
Telecom company faced mounting pressure to modernize outdated Omni channel system
Our client relied on several monolithic applications to run its retail, e-commerce and customer care applications. Lacking real-time processing, the systems frequently lagged, leading to frustration among employees and customers alike. Moreover, updates were restricted to specific times during the day, exacerbating the situation. Changes to the product catalog occurred in the middle of the night, so product and pricing data was not always current. In addition, the outdated application infrastructure wasn’t flexible enough to process new business rules, like eligibility guidelines for device upgrades. Facing high licensing costs for the proprietary applications and increasing pressure from more agile competitors, the CIO needed to find an IT partner that could help the company modernize the legacy systems.
THE TRANSFORMATION
New microservices application platform provided flexibility and responsiveness
The UST systems integration team retired the legacy applications and deployed a responsive, scalable, event-driven microservices platform. Doing so helped the company move awayfrom 23 expensive licensed applications to a single solution with ten microservices and no license fees. By separating business rules from underlying application source code, the cell service company could immediately update operational processes to change product catalogs, pricing, and device trade-in rules, to keep pace with evolving market conditions without delays from periodic, monolithic updates. Following a measured two-year timeline, the extensible application platform allowed the UST project team to scale the solution to onboard different lines of business without disruption to employees or customers.
THE IMPACT
Customer queries are 50% faster and system updates are near-instantaneous
The modern microservices application platform gave the telecom company much more flexibility to edit business rules to keep pace with changing market conditions. The new system was also much more responsive to customer demands for quick, easy routine services, like unlocking phones, trading-in devices, and requesting warranty claims. Product upgrade queries accelerated 50%-from 800 to 400ms. Adding products to shopping carts went from 1.5 seconds to near-instantaneous, and catalog updates occur in near-real-time instead of overnight.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/industries/tmt-telecom
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/digital-transformation
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/strategy-implementation-operations