Low-Code Digital Factory Part 2: Building an Omnichannel Digital Strategy 4 min
Blog Post
Entel's 90+ Developer Digital Factory Delivers Customer-Centric Agility
94 developers
in OutSystems factory
4 million
active monthly users
75 percent
NPS score
Entel is the leading telco operating in Chile and Peru, with over 20 million mobile subscribers. In 2017 the company adopted OutSystems to accelerate mobile and web application development. The company's OutSystems factory has 94 developers who support a portfolio of 28 applications and growing.
Mi Entel, the company's flagship mobile app, has over four million monthly active users in both Chile and Peru and a phenomenal 75 percent NPS score. With OutSystems, Entel has escaped the inertia of its hard-to-change legacy and gained the speed and agility needed to win, serve, and delight more customers.
- App Modernization
- Customer Experience
- Field Service Optimization
- Mobile Applications
- Operational Efficiency
"Mi Entel has had over ten million downloads—that's half the population of Chile—making it the second most downloaded app in the country. Its 75 percent NPS score is outstanding for a mobile app."
Eduardo Romano
CIO of Digital Channels, Entel
Challenge
Building a Foundation for Long-Lasting Growth
Entel is the leading technology and telecommunications company operating in Chile and Peru—with over 20 million mobile subscribers and annual revenues of over $2.4 billion as of December 2021.
As a longstanding incumbent with a complex IT legacy, Entel faced increasing competition from more fleet-footed competitors. The company needed to become much faster and more responsive to market opportunities and customer preferences.
In response, Entel launched Transformación Digital Entel (TDE) in 2017, an ambitious program to transform the company into a completely digital telco. The program included replacing virtually all its core systems to establish an agile architecture fit for the digital age.
“Adopting low-code and OutSystems enabled us to deliver complex customer-facing apps with high-quality standards in a fraction of the time it used to take.”
To accelerate its transformation, Entel sought a new approach to application development, which would satisfy three main objectives:
- Enable faster development to support agile ways of working
- Architectural fit to support continuous delivery and avoid legacy debt
- Support the development of world-class customer experiences.
Why Entel chose OutSystems:
Speed-up development and improve agility
Deliver public-facing web and mobile apps
Modernize legacy systems
Solution
Powering an Enterprise-Wide Digital Transformation
The first project was to redevelop the "prepaid" profile inside the Mi Entel mobile app. OutSystems consultants led this project with a small team of Entel developers shadowing.
To expand its developer pool, Entel established an OutSystems training academy, and by mid-2018, Entel had 40 certified OutSystems developers—a combination of employees and consultants.
By the end of 2018, OutSystems powered 100 percent of the Mi Entel mobile app used by Chilean consumers. The app provides intuitive self-service options so customers can more easily engage with Entel, order products and services, and control their options across prepaid or postpaid mobile, TV, and internet.
Also, in 2018, the team delivered a mobile sales app for the Peruvian market, a significant proof point for OutSystems and Entel's user experience team.
Mobile sales agents are often found at traffic lights in Peru, so they just have one minute to close a sale and complete the contract. This is no mean feat, as to comply with security legislation, they must scan the customer's fingerprint and verify it against the Peruvian government's identity system. The success of this app has been crucial to Entel's growth in Peru. Two thousand salespeople use this to sign-up new customers.
Today Entel has close to 100 developers organized in 13 squads developing and enhancing 28+ OutSystems applications.
"We're reorganizing our development squads by customer journey to maximize reuse across applications. With OutSystems, one development effort can deliver code used across mobile apps, portals, and internal applications."
Carlos Briones
Lead Product Owner for Digital Channels, Entel
To promote development reuse further, Entel now has several squads that transcend Chile and Peru. The Peruvian Mi Entel app reuses a large proportion of code originally written for the Mi Entel app used in Chile.
Eduardo Romano joined Entel as CIO of Digital Channels in late 2020. With a long and successful track record of managing large OutSystems factories, Eduardo has expanded the role played by OutSystems to a broader portfolio of applications.
"In the first couple of years, OutSystems had been typecast as the development platform for front-end customer-facing experiences at Entel. Expanding our portfolio to include mid-tier and backend development removes more technical debt and improves our agility."
Eduardo Romano
CIO of Digital Channels, Entel
Results
Newfound Agility Improves Customer Experience and Fuels Faster Growth
Entel's digital transformation has embraced organizational and cultural change alongside the modernization of its IT architecture. The company has reimagined business processes rather than just copying and pasting its old ways of working.
The benefits are clear to see. Despite increased competition, Entel's mobile customer base increased by nine percent in 2021; and the company took a 39.2 percent share of industry revenue in the last quarter of 2021.
Moreover, more efficient digital channels and processes have contributed to increasing profit—compound average organic EBITDA grew 14.3 percent from 2019 to 2021.
The enhanced user experience and increased functionality of Mi Entel have increased user adoption. Monthly active users climbed from 630,000 in 2017 to one million by late 2019 and two million by 2021. Meanwhile, Mi Entel's net promoter score rose from 60 percent in 2019 to 75 percent in 2021/22.
As more customers favor the mobile app, Entel benefits from channel shift, with fewer customers needing to visit stores or phone the contact center for services. Mobile app customer payments have risen 77 percent since 2019, and top-ups have risen 85 percent in the same period.
An example of Entel's widening portfolio of OutSystems apps is the roll-out of a new integrated desktop app to 6,000 retail and contact center employees. "We're replacing an old Java app, and other standalone apps with an OutSystems app called OneTouch," says Eduardo.
“By reimagining customer journeys and eliminating the need for users to switch between different applications, we expect to accelerate store and contact center transaction speeds by at least 30 percent."
Growing the local OutSystems talent pool is a continuing priority for Entel. "One of the reasons we adopted OutSystems was the shortage of modern application development skills in Chile and Peru," explains Eduardo. "OutSystems increases developer productivity by a factor of three to four, so we make the best use of such precious resources."
To further develop its engineering team, Entel has invested in localized training and certification materials and a new "Top Gun" elite developer training program, which includes two weeks at OutSystems in Lisbon for customized training and certification.
And to grow its talent pool, Entel offers a flexible combination of self-study and facilitated training that it calls "the 14-day challenge," suitable for business analysts and a wide range of IT roles with or without programming experience.
Watch Eduardo Romano's session at NextStep 2022 to learn more about Entel's journey with OutSystems.
