A scalable B2B portal API for Nordic telecom company

Business growth demanded a more scalable service that would speed up transactions

Our client is a top Nordic telecom that provides extensive services to a wide variety of customers, from consumers to large businesses.

Most of our client’s large B2B customers were using an already available self-service portal. The portal had multiple functionalities supporting the management of a large number of subscriptions.

The problem for B2B customers was that managing a one-thousand-employee company’s mobile and internet subscriptions one by one was very expensive manual work for the support people on both sides — the telco and its customers. They asked for a solution that would allow integration directly from their own IT systems, instead of logging into the self-service portal and dealing with the subscriptions there.

Our client’s goal was to enable B2B customers to manage employees’ telecommunication accounts, subscriptions, and services through their own IT systems. It was equally important to our client that the solution would process a large number of transactions simultaneously.

Building intuitive API product and making B2B portal scalable

Proekspert was trusted to build a modular, open architecture and an interface that could significantly improve the self-service experience for B2B customers.

Our biggest challenge was to model API technology in a simple, yet still abstract way. Our goal was to be understood by an industry novice, but still having the ability to cover a wide range of different products and processes.

The second challenge was how to make the mass transaction service scalable cost-effectively. The good thing was that the innovative microservices technology was mature and ready to be implemented into complex telecom backend systems.

Being middlemen in an ever-changing environment, we built the API and underlying microservices in a way that wouldn’t require re-integration by the end customer each time something changed inside our client’s systems.

Ultimately, our client’s frontend applications became the clients of the API as well, creating more manageable and cleaner architecture. And last but not least, having a single place to make changes in the future saves money on software development.

Scalable B2B portal APIs enable a seamless service experience for business customers

Creating a simple API and exposing it to the world opened up endless possibilities. For example: merging the information from different telcos or other service providers, using their respective APIs, creating comparisons of products and services, creating a new level of transparency in the market and making the end customer’s life a lot easier.

Today, B2B customers can integrate directly with our client’s systems and manage their subscriptions from their own IT systems, instead of doing duplicate work in our client’s self-service portal. Plus, the B2B portal APIs scale according to the number of transactions fast and effectively, so the experience for the users is always smooth.

For example, when a new employee joins an end customer’s company, their HR specialist can initially switch the employee’s personal phone subscription to the corporate one with a single click. A company phone number can be registered to a new client, or a new employee included in call distribution queues from their own IT systems. So, our client’s B2B end-user gets the same quality and personal service as a B2C customer.

Also, cooperation is easier with third-party partners. Using APIs is a must in the start-up world, where simplicity and speed are key factors in product and service rollouts. With the well-designed API, our client was able to find customers in the start-up segment. Taking advantage of the service, the start-ups expanded their own businesses, significantly growing our client’s subscription sales.

Impact on the customer business

Our client achieved their goal to adapt to its large customers’ needs and therefore grow its business.

• Scalable service reach:
1. Our client can now meet the requirements of their B2B customers of every size.
2. With the new self-service portal API product, our client is able to attract fast-growing start-ups to become their clients.
• Our client reduced service maintenance costs significantly:
1. The number of requests to the customer support center decreased notably.
2. The new B2B self-service portal API product enabled large customers to access relevant data and controls, so our client and the end customer saved time due to not having to deal with excessive manual operations.
3. Large customers can now easily interface their systems themselves via the API. It saves the time and effort of our client’s IT department. All future transactions are fully automated as well.