Via Verde Creates a Flexible CRM and Increases Customer Adoption by 400%

With demands for its services about to increase by as much as 300 percent, the Portuguese electronic toll collection systems provider Via Verde needed to enhance its online services to deliver better experiences with no drop in responsiveness. With OutSystems, the company rebuilt its CRM system and improved its web presence, increasing customer adoption by 400 percent.

“As we’ve become a more diverse business, we needed back-end systems and portals that could keep up. OutSystems has helped us create these quickly, while keeping complete control of our development.”

Nélio Marques, IT Customer Care Manager, Via Verde

New Regulations, New Demands

Challenge - Ever since it was founded in 1991, Via Verde has revolutionized the highways in Portugal. Knowing that time is money, the company provides an electronic toll collection device that allows drivers to pass in a non-stop lane, debiting the toll amount directly from the client’s bank account. With innovation at the core of its mission, Via Verde has expanded its systems to car parks, gas service stations, and drive-throughs, all with solid customer experience.

However, Via Verde knew things were about to change when the Portuguese government approved new legislation that converted many public highways to toll roads. This change forced drivers to either have a Via Verde electronic billing device or to make payments at local post offices. This had the potential to increase demand for Via Verde’s services by up to 300 percent in just three months, including processing nearly 400,000 transactions each day.

The problem was, like many organizations, Via Verde relied on SAP CRM to manage its customers and transactions. But, despite significant customization, its system couldn’t keep up with the growing demands. In addition, the amount of custom code created a suboptimal experience for users in Via Verde’s stores and customer service centers.

With SCUTS—the name given to the public highways turned into toll roads—threatening to introduce a huge volume of new customer transactions, Via Verde was concerned that its SAP CRM would be too slow to cope. Plus, direct human contact from a customer service representative for every incident was no longer viable. The toll collection provider needed to enable faster, more accessible self-service applications for its customers and improve the store experience with a faster, more intuitive customer service platform to meet this new demand.

A Faster, Flexible Development Approach

Solution - With just five months left to meet the new SCUTS legislation, Via Verde quickly realized its existing websites were not the answer.

Around this time, staff changes at Via Verde brought in a new IT manager from its parent company Brisa. The new manager had previous experience using the OutSystems low-code platform and suggested it would offer Via Verde the speed it needed to develop new front and back-end systems to support the SCUTS legislation.

“The key for us was developing a more open CRM solution. Once we’d done this, we had a hub for connecting our applications. OutSystems helped us develop both the hub and the spokes much faster than we could have otherwise.”

Nélio Marques, IT Customer Care Manager, Via Verde

Via Verde’s IT Customer Care Manager, Nélio Marques, was put in charge of implementing OutSystems. With a team of just three developers from OutSystems Elite Partner Do iT Lean, Nélio and his team created a custom, multi-tenant CRM that was open, flexible, lean, and able to easily integrate with other services through an API layer.

The OutSystems dev team at Via Verde also created many self-service apps to streamline transactions and improve the customer experience, including:

• A new Digital Signature tablet application to streamline in-store contract signing.
• A mobile app to help field sales teams provide a faster, more satisfying service to customers.