The secret to a leading telecom company's digital transformation

How a data-driven CX strategy keeps it ahead of the competition

This leading telecommunications company puts customers at the center of everything they do, making customer-centricity the foundation of every decision. By partnering with Alchemer, the product team successfully launched a new app that boosted customer engagement while enabling faster, more agile product development.

#1 in customer satisfaction

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app store rating

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“We have our finger on the pulse of our customer experience because of Alchemer.”

– Operational Insights Manager at Telecom company

About

Always putting customers first, a leading wireless carrier launched their new app that consolidates more than 100 individual applications into one comprehensive platform, making it even easier for customers to access their wide range of applications and services. The app enhances the customer experience by providing easy access to exclusive benefits, account management, special offers, and customer support. This unified solution marked a significant step in the company’s digital transformation, streamlining shopping, service, and more for its customers in one convenient app.

The company launched its app with clear criteria for success:

Increase the adoption with a goal of 40 million app downloads
Improve customer experience based on real-time feedback and achieve a 50+ NPS score
Increase the number of users per account with an app store rating above 4.8
Enhance engagement across different app features

These goals supported broader company initiatives to retain customers, reduce churn, build loyalty, engage users, and drive acquisition. By enhancing digital interactions, the company aimed to strengthen customer relationships and sustain its growth momentum. To do this, the product team needed a robust feedback platform to stay attuned to their customer experience before, during, and after the app launch.

“It’s really special because there’s 40,000,000 people that are wanting to say something to us and we get the ability to capture that, and it puts that level of responsibility on me and other product managers to take their voice and do something with it”

– Operational Insights Manager at Telecom company

Enter Alchemer

Alchemer Digital was the perfect solution for the job—easy to use, yet robust enough to handle the demands of managing a large-scale project. With Alchemer’s seamless integration into their app, the product team met customers exactly where they were and captured and analyzed real-time customer feedback. Gathering the necessary customer feedback ahead of their launch gave them confidence that the new super app would work, and continuously collecting feedback has been crucial in maintaining the app’s success every step of the way.

Let’s explore how Alchemer helped the company navigate key challenges and transform them into opportunities to refine the customer experience.

Challenges & Solutions

The company launched the app with the goal to deliver a seamless, integrated experience tailored to its diverse user base. The company aimed to streamline interactions, enhance usability, and strengthen customer engagement and loyalty—all while serving over 25 to 30 million monthly active users.

However, the company faced several significant challenges in their digital transformation journey:

Fragmented customer experience
Siloed feedback
Delayed issue resolution due to lack of real-time feedback

Challenge 1

Fragmented customer experience

With more than 100 separate apps for different services, customers struggled to navigate the company’s digital ecosystem, creating friction and frustration in their experience. Managing diverse account types and varying customer needs across multiple products required sophisticated targeting and personalization capabilities.

Tailored customer experiences

The app users are a broad group with different priorities, and needs. The company found it essential to implement a feedback mechanism that targets the right customers at the right time with relevant surveys, driving a high response rate.

Targeting & segmentation:
Using Alchemer, the company refined its app experience by analyzing distinct user behaviors and identifying key personas and engagement patterns. For example, one of the company’s most popular product’s, attracted users weekly with perks like free movie tickets and food, while products like Home Internet served a more utilitarian purpose with customers primarily using the app to troubleshoot or manage their service. Initially, these contrasting behaviors created friction within the app when users weren’t able to find what they needed.

With Alchemer, the product team tailored surveys for distinct user groups to understand customer expectations and capture user sentiment across various features. This enabled the company to identify low-engagement areas and uncover opportunities for improvement.

Strategic feedback collection:
Poorly timed feedback requests frustrate users, but Alchemer enabled the company to integrate surveys thoughtfully using app events and precise survey timing. Surveys appear immediately after key interactions, such as completing an upgrade or engaging with a home internet feature, delivering relevant and accurate insights. Capturing feedback at key moments in the customer journey not only improved response rates but also provided contextual insights, helping identify exactly where customers experienced friction within the app.

Alchemer Tip

Avoid over-surveying & protect the customer experience

Many apps over-survey users, which interrupts the user experience and leads to fatigue. Alchemer helps prevent this through its targeting capabilities, ensuring customers don’t receive another survey unless they meet specific criteria. With 40 million monthly app users, the telecom company only needs about 400 responses per survey to achieve a 95% confidence rating, eliminating the need for large sample sizes and excessive prompts.

Challenge 2

Siloed feedback

Multiple apps and product teams resulted in scattered customer feedback and analytics, making it difficult to get a comprehensive view of customer needs and behaviors.

Data-driven decision making across teams

At the company, customer feedback is highly valued across teams as a key piece of data to drive decision-making. The data collected in the app by the product team is shared across retail teams, frontline care teams, and other departments, as part of a major push to communicate insights throughout the business.

They use these instant customer insights to:

Track trends and key metrics over time
Customized dashboards help track progress against key metrics and OKRs, enabling them to adjust strategies and drive improvements in customer satisfaction. Within their NPS dashboard, they can identify the factors that caused NPS to rise one week and drop the next.

Using Alchemer for NPS tracking empowers, the company’s leadership to use customer experience metrics to drive strategic decisions, seamlessly incorporating feedback into the company’s overall goals.

Driving the product roadmap
By analyzing app interactions and segmenting user feedback, the company gains actionable insights to refine its digital experiences. Customer feedback guides which experiences should be prioritized for native integration within the app, reducing reliance on external links.

A key tool, Alchemer’s “Love Dialogue” asks users if they love the app. Positive responses lead to higher ratings, while negative feedback triggers detailed surveys to identify pain points and prioritize updates. For example, by comparing NPS across different products, the company identified long-standing pain points and adjusted development to address them. For example, they identified challenges with online billing, and, as a result, they launched app shortcuts to streamline access and make it easier for customers.

The login and onboarding experience also improved based on feedback, which prioritized authentication and security upgrades. The improvements resulted in a positive uptick in reviews and NPS.

The company’s success with their app highlights the power of customer-driven development. By leveraging Alchemer to act on user feedback, the company continuously improves its offerings and strengthens customer loyalty.

Challenge 3

Delayed issue resolution due to lack of real-time feedback

Sending CSAT surveys during traditional quarterly release cycles made it difficult to respond quickly to customer feedback and technical issues in real time, potentially impacting customer satisfaction during critical periods like new iPhone launches or updates.

Data-driven decision making across teams

The company drives loyalty through their app by using Alchemer to collect continuous customer feedback and enable agile, monthly updates.

Act on problems before they escalate
The company stays in tune with customer sentiment by utilizing the Love Dialogue feature. This simple “Do you love this app?” question serves as an early indicator of customer feelings, even before App Store ratings and NPS scores are available.

Support rapid iteration cycles
The company aims to maintain an NPS score of 50+ during critical product launches. They leverage Alchemer’s real-time feedback capabilities to capture insights on new features and releases directly within the app, sending a targeted CSAT survey to customers immediately after a product update or new feature launch. Based on the feedback, the product team can quickly identify and address potential issues, allowing them to iterate rapidly and roll out updates or fixes. Real-time feedback on new features and releases enables the team to quickly identify and resolve potential issues, supporting an agile release strategy that delivers high-quality updates. This efficient feedback-driven approach boosted app usability, driving a steady NPS of 65 during critical product launches.

“Our company embraces the agile methodology with iterative work. Our integration with Alchemer is one of the most important parts of our success with agile because we get the feedback we need fast.”

– Insights Manager at Telecom company

Capabilities

It's not all about the tech

While Alchemer’s customers often rave about capabilities, it’s truly our people who make all the difference. A few stand-out benefits that the company appreciates about Alchemer’s team:

Weekly availability of the customer support team: Weekly calls to provide ongoing support.
Flexibility of the Alchemer product team: Ability to make changes that improve the user experience, including compressing and decompressing multiple surveys efficiently.
Agility compared to larger competitors: The Alchemer team can iterate quickly and truly listens to our needs.

Key Outcomes

The telecom company’s continued focus on customer centricity and leveraging customer feedback has resulted in 50 million app downloads in 2024, surpassing their 40 million goal. They successfully consolidated multiple apps into a single platform, boosting customer engagement through native app experiences and improved customer experience, ultimately achieving their objectives and more:

App store ratings soared above 4.8 stars
Consistent NPS scores of 58+
Improved efficiency through real-time feedback for proactive issue resolution and product refinements
Increased revenue with more than 900,000 postpaid net phone customers added to the app
Gained a competitive advantage by continuously outperforming competitors in customer care ratings

Conclusion

The company’s continued goal is to drive customer retention by addressing pain points and attracting long-term, loyal customers. They aim to create a sticky app experience that encourages users to become monthly, weekly, or daily active users. With Alchemer’s capabilities, the company is evolving its strategy to further personalize user experiences, refine app functionality, and set new industry standards for customer engagement.

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