My MEO 2.0 – a whole new experience

The Client and its context

MEO is the biggest triple play (Internet, TV and Cable Phone) provider in Portugal. Having millions of customers and a wide range of services to offer, the digital became critical for MEO’s goals. 

Being the market leader, gives MEO the responsibility to be the reference when it comes to customer service. There are many stores available and a call centre in Portugal, but the digital channels are becoming key to promote the offer and to give customers the ability to manage the relationship with the company anytime and anywhere.

The Challenge

MEO was looking to improve its relationship with customers, increasing the overall customer service experience. In this context, the mobile channel was selected as crucial, but MEO’s app for mobile was still web based, away from the experience they wanted to provide for their customers.

MEO had the ambition to implement the best customer service mobile application in Portugal. Having a first version already available, the company felt that there was a very big opportunity to create something from scratch to deliver a whole new experience.

In order to achieve these goals (improve the relationship with customers, and provide a better experience through the mobile app), MEO understood that the new application should be mobile native, not web based, and it should provide the same experience across different platforms (such as Android and iOS).

The Solution

The application was built using React Native, a cross platform technology that allowed us to build a single solution being then deployed for iOS and Android. The implementation was totally focused on delivering the best experience aligned with a top performance. To achieve this we applied the following concepts:

Skeleton – used to ensure a cohesive visual interface throughout the several screens of the application;

Cache – this component was critical not only for the performance side, but also for protecting the legacy systems integrated with the application. The cache was not only used for the multimedia assets, but also for creating a protection buffer when getting the customers information. We could not use a “one size fits all ” mindset when dealing with the customers information cache, so we defined the cacheable items and behaviour for them. This implementation was never done this way with React Native. Was fully conceived by our team;

Dynamic Links – the dynamic links with deep linking are key for providing a great customer experience. MEO needed to have the ability for sending several communications types (text messages, e-mails, push notifications, links from Chatbot) and direct the user to the right screen, with the right context;

Push notifications – the notifications were implemented with Firebase to take advantage of the Google Ecosystem;

Analytics – GA4 with Big Query was the elected stack. (get to know this Whitiepaper, where we present our vision about the Future of Analytics)

Aligned with the technology the project’s Governance Model was also critical to ensure the success of it. A mixed team of MEO and Devoteam members was working with an integrated approach managed by a single management layer. This way we could ensure the alignment between the business, the design and the technical streams.

During the project duration we overcame multiple milestones that led to a successful launch:

First release on production environment – four months before launch we started to have builds on production. It allowed us to stabilise the solution on the final environment;

Security assessments – the solution had two security assessments  to ensure the compliance with the technical best practices and the MEO’s standards;

Beta stage – one month before the official launch the MEO’s employees were invited to be part of a beta stage, having access first hand to the application. This period was very relevant to gather feedback based on real usage that allowed us to fine tune the solution and experience.

Main results and benefits for the customer

The application is now installed on over 1,1M mobile devices. The launch was featured on the portuguese media, being nominated as app of the day by one of the titles. The app’s rating has also increased to 4,5/5 in iOS and 4,3/5 in Android. The analytical part is now playing a very important role as information source for the customers behaviour providing new insights.