A 4-year partnership with telco giant Telefonica | Telco Development Company

A 4-year partnership with telco giant Telefonica

About

Successive development projects for improving their employee notification system

Telefónica operates in 21 countries, providing over 270 million mobile lines and 37 million telephone connections around the globe. In Uruguay, the company is known as Movistar, and connects over 1.5 million clients through its telephone, internet and entertainment services.

Challenge

Internal communication issues: data loss and misunderstandings

As a multinational brand, Movistar provides multiple apps for both its clients and internal teams. One of them is an employee notification system used by their professionals to track errors and downtimes in its mobile network and infrastructure. The app also tracks the employee’s required scheduled maintenance jobs.

Previously, Movistar employees would be informed as well as inform others of network problems through email or phone, which was an ineffective process Looking to overcoming this challenge, they selected us as their software provider to build this app in 2016.

Solution

A UX-oriented system connects different departments

Our proposal was to focus on the employee notification system interface and user experience so it could be attractive and valuable for all the employees who needed to follow up the system’s status. Two software engineers, a product owner and a UX designer worked with a user-centered approach to create a tool that could be easily adopted by all.

As Movistar was working within a budget, we incorporated agile and lean practices to prioritize and build an initial version that was simple, but completely useful. Together, with Movistar employees who were involved in this project, we were able to find a collaborative workflow based on weekly sprints and continuous iterations.

Employees were interviewed and invited to share their opinions about the system during the whole development process, and this allowed us to refine the backlog so the initial MVP could fit the budget. Once the app was released, every stakeholder felt ownership towards and were very keen to use the tool.

Results

Notification system becomes core messaging platform

The solution resulted in a custom web app that allows for sending messages, featuring email broadcasting, maps for reporting and self-service features. Given the fast and widespread adoption of the platform, we continued to work on the app’s improvement, fulfilling four development phases.