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CRM Modernization Accelerates Service Excellence for a Leading Telecom Provider

CRM Modernization Accelerates Service Excellence for a Leading Telecom Provider

introduction

A case study on the modernization of a legacy system, executed for a tier 1 telecom company.

problem statement

  • Absence of a modern web solution for company’s customers to be able to buy their eyeglasses/contacts online.
  • Lack of a dedicated e-commerce platform for selling prescription eyewear and contact lenses
  • Customers were forced to go to the physical branches of the company to order their glasses, even after they have gotten their eye exams and prescriptions.
  • Lack of online marketing. Dependency of a technical resource existed whenever content had to be changed by Sales and Marketing teams.
  • Exhausting phone calls and emails load for physical branch personnel that delayed other works.
  • Product must be in-store for customers to buy at the company’s physical branches.
  • Lack of delivery services.
  • Absence of an online way for customers to see prescription measurements and access their personal information for company related services.
  • Absence of a comprehensive pricing engine to handle complex insurance, promotions, discounts, and employee pricing rules
  • Requirement for a scalable and performant solution to handle large datasets and user interactions
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analysis

The existing architecture for ordering vision essentials, managing patient prescriptions, managing available products, prices, and make-ability rules, the competitors’ ecommerce experiences, the marketing opportunities, the automatization opportunities for updating the product catalogue, gathering users’ measurements, customizing lenses, ordering and checking out, were all taken into consideration during the study process.

implementation

  • Developed a React-based frontend with a pixel-perfect implementation of Figma UI designs
  • Scaffolded the project with React, Gatsby, Tailwind, ContentStack, Husky, and Jest.
  • Developed responsive interfaces using HTML, Tailwind, TypeScript, and created reusable react components. All done while matching the Figma designs received from the UX team.
  • Created content models and entries in ContentStack and built logic around them to make multiple components, layouts, and pages customizable from the dashboard without having to change the code nor redeploy the app. Allowing the company content managers to make these changes without depending on the DEV team.
  • Built locale logic with ContentStack and i18next to show region specific marketing and labels to improve user conversion.
  • Built a Lens Wizard that takes care of guiding the user through lens customization, making sure that their available selections are only the ones that match their measurements and makeability requirements. Options are linked to Commercetools and ContentStack to keep them dynamic. Business rules for what to show, how to present them, etc, are predefined on a configuration file.
  • Built a structure to gather and transform data from multiple existing services into the format that Lens Wizard expects. This allows the company’s region teams to update their catalogue and Lens Wizard will automatically update with it.
  • Built a Pricing Engine that takes care of analysing user data according to predefined requirements, and running a set of rules to get the correct price of the product the user is trying to buy. This applies discounts and savings plans to the default price to account for user and employee benefits.
  • Connected to third-party PD measurement tool to allow users to get an online PD measurement.
  • Built Catalogue Manager microservice to get the data feed of products from the existing system and populating it into Commercetools for the web app’s consumption.
  • Created a structure for the products to be displayed as a catalogue with functionality to browse and filter lenses by multiple parameters like shape, color, brand, etc.
  • Built User Manager microservice to handle user data business logic.
  • Created unit tests to improve code quality and reach a minimum of 80% code coverage.
  • Implemented Agile Methodology: Organized development into time-bound iterations, fostering collaboration and delivering incremental results. Conducted regular iteration planning to prioritize tasks and daily stand-ups for alignment. Held thorough iteration retrospectives for continuous improvement.
  • Optimized performance through techniques such as virtualization, pagination, and memorization
  • Implemented Zustand for efficient state management across the application
  • Documentation
    • Third-party integrations with ContentStack, Commercetools, PD tool.
    • Region-based differences in content, labels, data flow, test users and other related information.
    • Complex implementations like Lens Wizard and Pricing Engine.
    • Data flows at different stages of the user’s journey: login, adding to cart, checkout payments, etc.

technologies used

React for frontend development
Express.js and NestJS for backend services
GraphQL for API development
Contentstack as a headless CMS
Tailwind CSS for rapid UI development
Jest and React Testing Library for testing
Zustand for state management
Node.js as the runtime environment
Swagger for API documentation
ESLint for code quality and consistency
TypeScript
Gatsby
Commercetools
PostgreSQL
Azure
Husky
Jenkins
Java Spring boot Framework
Tibco EMS
Tibco Active spaces
Traffic cluster for authentication and Load balancing
Kibana, elastic search and Logstash for monitoring and alerting dashboard
Plugins for Legacy protocols
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outcomes & benefits

  • Successfully delivered a fully functional e-commerce website for prescription eyewear and contact lenses
  • Improved customer experience through an intuitive and responsive user interface
  • Dynamic link between existing systems and the newly developed architectures for the web application were developed.
  • Products, prices, availability rules were automatically updated when the existing data feeds were updated.
  • The company’s content managers were able to modify marketing banner, tiles, notifications, page layouts, component options, etc, and the web application reflected the changes instantly without further intervention from the DEV team.
  • Maintainability and Scalability. All the code was created with an agnostic mindset, making important pieces of code be able to be “plug and play”.
  • Very high code quality and reliability, as well as thorough documentation.
  • Streamlined online experience for users to be able to see their prescriptions, manage their personal information, browse through available products, use their prescriptions to customize and order their eyeglasses or buy contact lenses, and get their necessary PD measurement online.
  • Responsive experience in all areas of the web application.
  • Implemented a robust pricing engine capable of handling complex pricing scenarios
  • Enhanced overall system performance and scalability to handle large datasets and user interactions

conclusion

This case study underscores the significance of adopting an integrated approach that combines customer-centric initiatives, technical innovation, and continuous development to thrive in the competitive landscape of human capital management. The implementations mentioned in this case study were done with the effort of both teams in the company’s Vision project. We have successfully gathered requirements and created separate but connectable architectures that link to existing systems and third-party tools to bring a streamlined user experience that is dynamically updated and can be maintained easily as per the requirement. The company has witnessed the conception of a new product that will technologically revolutionize their current way of selling vision essentials, once it’s ready for production.

Executive Summary

This case study presents the CRM modernization project executed by Ivoyant for a well-known telecom client. Faced with an inefficient legacy CRM system, the client company sought complete overhaul of its customer support system. Ivoyant successfully transformed the existing system into a scalable, microservices-based CRM solution, within a short span of six months.

Introduction & Background

The client, a leading telecommunication service provider, has long been recognized for its commitment to delivering affordable, high-quality mobile connectivity to millions of customers across the United States. As part of a highly competitive telecom market, the company consistently strives to deliver superior customer experience while optimizing operational efficiency.

The company's operational setup dealt with various critical functions - one such being customer care operations - housed with customer support agents providing round-the-clock service to its customers. Daily operational work involved handling customer requests, customer queries, service requests, issues/complaints and more. The pressure on customer support agents was high – to service as many customer calls as possible, creating the necessity to have an efficient tool – one that could enable customer support agents meet high service demands.

However, the company’s customer care operations relied on a legacy spreadsheet-like CRM system that had become a major bottleneck in its service delivery chain. The outdated tool struggled to keep pace with growing customer demands and operational complexity. The support agents faced a host of problems – ranging from inefficient navigation between multiple tabs and screens, data duplication to slow data retrieval times. These culminated in longer call durations, inconsistent customer experiences, and increased maintenance costs.

In the light of these challenges, the client company sought comprehensive modernization of its customer relationship management system - one that would unify data, streamline processes, and empower agents with smarter, faster tools.  

Ivoyant, a digital transformation partner with deep expertise in enterprise-grade CRM modernization, was selected to lead the initiative.

The goal was ambitious: to transform the existing legacy system into a cloud-native, microservices-driven CRM platform - within a six-month timeframe. The resulting solution, a state-of-the-art CRM, was designed to revolutionize customer service delivery with scalability, resilience, and intelligent automation at its core.

Pain Points & Challenges

The client’s legacy CRM system was plagued by several critical inefficiencies. The key ones being:

  • Simplistic authentication mechanism made room for security vulnerabilities and fraudulent activities.  
  • Cumbersome UI forced customer care agents to spend time on multiple clicks, tab switches and navigation for even basic operations.  
  • Fragmented data silos and lack of system integration led to unforeseen errors and poor visibility into customer journeys.  
  • Customer care agents were forced to perform repetitive manual tasks in many places.
  • Slow data retrieval and inefficient search mechanism led to operational inefficiency and agonisingly long call durations.
  • The inability of the legacy architecture to support high data loads further constrained system scalability.
  • Dearth of quality reporting and analytics capabilities made it difficult to derive actionable insights from customer data.  

Overall, these challenges translated into frustrated users and inconsistent service quality – the net effect resulting in poor customer satisfaction, operational inefficiency and high maintenance cost.

Solution

Ivoyant proposed a complete overhaul of the legacy CRM architecture, replacing it with a microservices-based system capable of handling high concurrency and seamless integrations. The new CRM was conceptualized to deliver operational ease, efficiency, agility, intelligence, and scalability while ensuring a visually engaging and intuitive interface for customer support teams.

Key solution pillars included:

  • Modular Microservices Architecture: Independent services for accounts, billing, payments, and authentication ensured scalability and fault tolerance.
  • Bot-based Customer Authentication: Integrated chat and IVR bots performed multi-factor authentication, reducing fraud and speeding up call initiation.
  • AI-Driven Customer Insights: Machine learning-driven “Smart Actions” having the capability to suggest relevant services and offers, enabling agents to anticipate and meet customer needs.
  • Automated Interaction Capture: Novel method of capturing customer’s voice interaction with the customer care agents and subsequent transformation into notes, using AI-based techniques.
  • Data Caching and Observability: In-memory caching feature accelerated data retrieval, while MongoDB and Cassandra ensured robust, distributed data handling.
  • Enhanced User Experience: Built on React with Redux and Ant Design, the new interface minimized clicks, automated workflows, and improved agent productivity.
  • Seamless Integration: APIs and BPMN-driven orchestration (via Camunda) enabled dynamic coordination of microservices and effortless integration with internal and external systems.
  • High Availability Framework: Azure-based dual-region deployment ensured zero downtime and disaster recovery capability.

This holistic transformation enabled the client company to future-proof its CRM infrastructure, positioning the organization for faster growth and superior customer engagement.

Implementation

The transformation project was executed in six months, following a structured, agile methodology. The engagement began with an exhaustive study of the existing CRM ecosystem to identify pain points and design an optimized architecture aligned with business goals. Ivoyant’s cross-functional teams - including UI/UX designers, solution architects, backend engineers, and QA specialists - collaborated closely with stakeholders at the client company throughout the lifecycle.

Development was divided into modular sprints:

  • Frontend Modernization: Implemented React-based, responsive UI with Ant Design and Redux for real-time state management.
  • Backend Revamp: Java Spring Boot microservices handled accounts, billing, payments, and security. Redis caching and Cassandra databases enhanced speed and stability.
  • Orchestration Layer: Camunda BPMN workflows managed business logic dynamically, reducing dependency on hardcoded rules.
  • Integration and Testing: APIs were developed for secure interfacing with billing, payment gateways, and data warehousing systems. Comprehensive testing ensured system resilience and compliance.

Benefits Reaped

The revamped CRM delivered transformative results:

  • Operational Efficiency: Average call handling time dropped from over 8 minutes per call to approximately 7.04 minutes. With approximately 200 agents / 50 calls per agent per day, the average call-handling cost witnessed an annual monetary benefit of approximately $8.6M (at $21.50/hour blended rate).
  • Customer Experience: 80% of calls were answered within 20 seconds, aligning well within telecom industry benchmarks.
  • Representative Productivity and Retention: Intuitive workflows, fewer clicks, and streamlined navigation improved job satisfaction and reduced training time. The new solution enabled healthy retention rates of customer support agents – reduction in support agent turnover seen by 5% - enabling huge savings to agent replacement cost.
  • Agent Training Time: The new system’s efficient design and architecture enabled the client company to achieve reduction in support agent training cycle from 6 weeks to 3 weeks. This translated to saving $2592 per hire (with $865/week as training cost).
  • Faster Time-To-Market: The new microservice-based design coupled with an intuitive UI enabled the client to roll out new service offerings at a very quick rate – with ability to launch 8-10 business initiatives per year vs 2-3 previously!
  • Scalability and Performance: The cloud-native design enabled seamless handling of high call volumes and concurrent users.
  • Case Management Efficiency: The new solution’s integrated case management feature had a direct impact in reducing call handling time and escalations. An average of 2 minutes per case was saved thanks to integrated workflows enabling the client company to save $1.15M annually.
  • Enhanced Security: Bot-based and SSO-enabled authentication reduced fraud risks significantly.
  • Data-Driven Insights: Real-time dashboards, predictive analytics, and reporting features improved decision-making and campaign effectiveness.

The above metrics are tabulated below for quick reference:

Metric Before Modernization After Modernization Gain
Average Call Handling Time 8+ minutes 7.04 minutes $8.6M savings (Annual)
Agent Training Duration 6 weeks 3 weeks $2,592 saved (per hire)
Agent Turnover Baseline - - 5% reduction
New Service Launches 2-3 per year 8-10 per year Faster time-to-market
Case Handling Efficiency - - 2 minutes saved per case
Calls Answered in 20 Seconds 60% 80% Industry benchmark achieved

Beyond performance metrics, the solution elevated the telecom client’s customer-centric culture by enabling proactive, data-informed service delivery. The modernization not only boosted operational KPIs but also strengthened brand trust and customer loyalty.

Conclusion & Call to Action

The successful deployment of the new CRM solution stands as a testament to how legacy modernization, when executed with precision and innovation, can redefine an organization’s operational DNA.  

The CRM modernization project delivered a compelling ROI with payback in under 14 months. The combination of operational efficiency gains, vendor cost reduction, and improved business agility created annual benefits exceeding $13M against an initial investment of $15M.

The client company’s transformation journey with Ivoyant showcases how microservices architecture, AI-enabled workflows, and seamless integrations can convert customer support from a cost centre into a strategic growth engine.

The project demonstrated measurable improvements in key areas like operational efficiency, agent productivity, faster time-to-market and customer satisfaction - all achieved within an accelerated 6-month delivery window. By embracing modern technology frameworks, the client company not only overcame legacy constraints but also gained a sustainable competitive edge in the dynamic telecom market.

For enterprises grappling with aging systems and fragmented processes, this case study serves as an inspiring blueprint. Ivoyant’s expertise in legacy transformation, coupled with its agile, customer-first approach, enables organizations to unlock innovation and operational excellence.

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