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By Acro Commerce on
Acro Commerce, a mid-size commerce and web development company operating out of Kelowna, B.C. has forged a lasting relationship with Canada's top telecommunications company - TELUS. From humble beginnings creating temporary solutions to now developing the largest ever Drupal commerce build as a permanent infrastructure, Acro Commerce’s work with TELUS won the company the 2014 Canada Post E-Commerce Innovation Award for Best Mobile Experience, and the team at Acro Commerce couldn’t be more proud.
Why Drupal was chosen:
TELUS was originally on a static HTML website that they developed in-house with a group of 5-7 individuals that worked full time managing the manually coded website. This system offered their marketing team flexibility however it was a crude system and difficult for their team to maintain. They began working with another web agency that was building them a proprietary system as their new “permanent” solution.
After adopting their new proprietary platform TELUS knew right away that this was not going to be the right solution for what they needed. They were handcuffed to a system that wasn’t in line with their development path or marketing needs and any customization of functionality was waiting for months in the development que.
In the meantime, the new iPhone 4 was being released and TELUS had no other option but to find a solution that could accomplish their goals for their iPhone 4 launch.
This is when TELUS reached out to work with Acro Commerce. Within a couple weeks, Acro Commerce was able to build the functionality that TELUS needed for their launch on their old platform. Because of this success, TELUS has now chosen Acro Commerce and Drupal as their new commerce providers.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
RETAIL & B2C SOLUTIONS
TELUS
Better UX design and a forward-thinking B2C custom commerce architecture created market-defining customer experiences for TELUS Mobility.
Project highlights
- Increased order processing
- Increased server transactions
- Scalable & flexible UX
Consumer habits and needs are continuously evolving. Retail & B2C organizations need to be able to adapt quickly.
A flexible, scalable ecommerce platform will make acting on consumer demands simpler, faster and more agile. Improved sales will come from:
- Streamlined customer experience across all digital channels.
- Improved data flow to get marketing teams the right insights at the right time.
- Continuous innovation and improvement of integrated systems.
Our work with TELUS Mobility started with a project to replace their old static HTML website over a decade ago, and convert their ecommerce system to a more effective, responsive, flexible decoupled platform. Read on to find out how we helped Telus win the Canada Post E-Commerce Innovation Award for Best Mobile Experience and build a platform capable of handling iPhone pre-sales that crashed competitors’ websites.
Background
Connecting customer account information, billing details, promotions and the newest product offerings all in one seamless experience is the best-in-class experience expectation.
Imagine the missed opportunities when your customer’s online billing isn’t connected to your latest promotions, and you can’t quickly or easily get this information in front of them.
This is how the commerce architecture redesign started for TELUS Mobility, Canada’s second-largest telecommunications company.
To address their desire for a seamless customer experience, market agility and complete ownership over their platform, TELUS Mobility had to look beyond an out-of-the-box solution to a more flexible, less constrictive solution. These needs created an opening to benefit from the most customizable option out there: open source architecture.
Objective
What TELUS Mobility wanted to achieve from a decoupled solution.
They knew what their customers wanted in an online experience:
- A seamless and intuitive connection between new products, promotions, billing and account management.
And they understood their business objectives:
- Develop an adaptive, responsive commerce platform that allowed them to respond decisively and quickly to changing market intelligence.
- Increase market share.
The challenge was designing a solution that met all internal stakeholder’s (accounting, marketing, logistics, IT, C-suite) needs and enhancing their customers' experience.
TELUS Mobility wanted:
- A secure, agile and flexible platform they could control.
- A seamless customer experience, from billing and account management to shopping and promotions.
- To own all the code and manage all the data in-house to avoid vendor lock.
- Data sovereignty for strict regulatory compliance.
- The new platform to accommodate and communicate with all existing homebrew applications.
- Scalability during high traffic times.
- The ability to break the build into phases.
- A detailed, cohesive plan to migrate the new platform into space without downtime or service disruption to their customers.
Solution
Breaking free from a proprietary platform and gaining the tools to scale and integrate across the business.
Groundbreaking headless commerce architecture solutions, supported by our Agile principle-backed development process built for continuous improvement.
- Uncover and accommodate the needs of all stakeholders.
- Visually diagram the new digital workflow and server architecture.
- Map data from existing systems to the new architecture.
- Identify the purpose of individual modules: which would be used, and which needed to be custom-built.
- Pinpoint software components to be rebuilt, replaced, or maintained and connected.
- Detailed UX and technical blueprint.
- Security and data sovereignty planning.
- Internal and external QA.
Outcome
An effective, responsive, and flexible decoupled system that increased usability to deliver an overall better customer experience and increased sales.
The new headless architecture allowed TELUS Mobility to:
- Process thousands of orders each month.
- Handle more than 100 server transactions per second.
- Execute tactical marketing strategies at will, with total control.
- Effectively integrate all existing homebrew applications.
- Manage all data in-house.
- Increase flexibility and scalability during seasonal high-traffic times.
“I actually found the end-to-end purchasing process insanely clear and easy, and I congratulate TELUS in creating such a smooth customer experience.”
Voice of the client, TELUS
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 9.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
With the functionality TELUS requires, Acro Commerce has developed 33 custom modules to this date for their website. Currently, only one of those custom modules has been contributed back to the community (see below Community Contributions); however, we do hope to contribute back the custom modules we have created for TELUS.
Drupal Commerce — To provide effective, streamlined and flexible ecommerce functionality that TELUS would need to sell their products online.
Community contributions:
Organizations involved:
Project team:
Working with a company like TELUS we knew there would be tight deadlines and goals to reach right from the get go. In this case, project management is just as important as the actual build itself.
Specifically, for TELUS , we have a dedicated team of project managers and developers that work strictly with TELUS to ensure all deadlines and goals are met on time.
We meet with TELUS anywhere from 1 to 10 times a day. We are responsible for TELUS Mobility, along with a couple of projects in the Products & Services division. There are a number of different departments that contribute to these projects, which is why we have to meet so frequently.
The TELUS account is unique because it is an agile project. It is a constant flow of large and small launches. The focus is more on quarterly goals, rather than start and end dates like in a traditional waterfall project.
Working with TELUS is also unique because the account is comprised of two different teams, one on either side of the country, with one common goal. This may sound like a management nightmare, but with lots of communication and elbow grease, we have formed a special relationship with the TELUS team in Toronto, which has been the key to helping us meet and exceed our goals.
Sectors:
E-Commerce
