The fast-paced global consulting organisation supports over 40K community members across 19 countries, providing a range of business advisory, consulting and training services to help them maintain a competitive edge.
The Challenge
The application needed to serve 30,000 users across the globe. The brief was to improve upon an existing Android legacy application modelled to connect the members within the community, modernising the experience and rebuilding it on the OutSystems platform. The legacy application had performance issues and was costly to maintain and enhance. The legacy platform could not scale easily to support the growing number of users with an expected 20,000 additional users potentially joining the growing set of digital services.
Customer engagement and time to market were key, as the app is the foundation for a number of additional services for its members.
Security of all community members information was another important factor, which meant that on-device storage of community data could not be utilised in the solution design. This, combined with the requirement for real-time information to be presented to the application user via APIs, presented the team with a substantial technical challenge.
The PhoenixDX Solution
The application was designed to expand and dramatically improve the user experience from the previous application. It acts as an important communication channel within the community of users and will need to continually adapt to additional requirements. As such, our customer decided to modernise their technology strategy, and move their focus from their existing engagement stack to the OutSystems platform. This enabled them to not only rebuild their current functionality quickly and safely, but it also gave them the confidence that they can evolve the platform according to their roadmap and users feedback.
The app works as a private directory to connect the members of the community. Now they can sign in using fingerprint or using facial recognition, receive notifications even if they logged out of the app, find other user using an advanced search engine and update their profiles with pictures and details at any time. The user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX) was carefully reviewed and the back-office web application modernised, improving all the management processes needed to serve and support the community mobile app.
The platform and delivery team were able to meet and exceed the challenging technical and security requirements. The architectural, performance, stability and security elements of the OutSystems platform were fully utilised to ensure an exceptional user experience.
Results
Once the application was rolled out, there was immediate positive feedback on the satisfaction of the community members. The new application allowed them to engage better, with an enhanced experience being delivered to them no matter the process that they were engaged in. The application loads fast and the user interface and navigation flow are easier and intuitive.
The new app is also the platform to expand its services, which will bring new revenue streams and increase the number of subscriptions.
This was also the first legacy modernisation application that our customer had created using OutSystems, and acted as the launching pad for their wider digital transformation acceleration. The utilisation of a robust system architecture has enabled future applications on their roadmap to be built fast, right and future proof.
Their technical team has grown and learnt with PhoenixDX, and they were now empowered to keep evolving the application to continually meet whatever requirements the future brings in their digital transformation journey.
In this way, PhoenixDX has proven that OutSystems is a suitable platform for large scale customer-facing applications. Its core functions were built in 16 weeks, under high-quality standards, tested and optimised to support millions of daily transactions.
