Just like so many companies chained to the monolithic platforms of yore, Telmore recognized that their old-school commerce architecture was hindering their growth. The MACH approach, on the other hand, offered everything they needed to put them on the path to reaching their commerce goals. And so Telmore turned to commercetools – the founder of the MACH Alliance.
It’s a tale of woe that is becoming more and more commonplace. Businesses that once relied on the likes of SAP, Salesforce, Magento and other all-in-one commerce platforms in the 2010s have now outgrown these restrictive systems. Digital expectations have changed, and these businesses now desire cutting-edge commerce architecture that can grow as they grow, integrate new solutions in a flash and customize customer experiences for wow-worthy online encounters.
What’s more, these outdated, inflexible and cumbersome monolithic setups are actually stifling growth and making the businesses that count on them less competitive than their industry counterparts who have adopted a more modern commerce approach. Telmore, a world-leading provider of mobile phone services, found themselves in exactly this boat – and that’s what propelled them toward commercetools.
At Telmore, we strive to deliver excellent customer experiences across all touchpoints. Our ambition is to create a best-in-industry buying experience by launching our new online shop with the right products and buying flows from the start to increase sales and maintain Telmore’s position as a well-loved brand. Building the right shop with the right eCommerce solution is essential in that ambition.
CIO, Telmore
Monolithic mayhem
Created in 2000, Telmore was a visionary in the discount mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) field by being among the first in their industry to use the internet as their primary sales and services channel. By the end of 2010, Telmore had captured 10% of mobile market shares, totalling 700,000 subscribers. But although Telmore had been at the forefront of digital commerce by having the insight to swing toward digital sales, their commerce platform was slowing them down and holding them back.
Telmore had been using monoliths SAP Hybris for 10 years and Oracle WebCenter CMS for nine years, along with an Angular frontend, but it became clear that this commerce solution’s performance was weak. To begin with, it was difficult to SEO optimize their content – and being that this is the 21st century in which SEO is ubiquitous, not being able to implement SEO-rich content is a major handicap compared to most other websites that do. Additionally, their previous platform was not agile at all – simple tasks took way too long – and had no shopping basket so Telmore couldn’t sell accessories with their phones, costing them sales.
Motivated by MACH
To counteract the lost time and sales that their legacy commerce platform was incurring, Telmore conceived of new strategic objectives that their new commerce solution should be able to achieve. These objectives were:
Increase revenue by creating an easily accessible and commercially savvy solution, allowing Telmore to drive more sales online;
Increase traffic to Telmore’s digital touchpoints and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by creating a second-to-none digital experience;
Provide a more agile system setup, thereby allowing faster time-to-market.
The solution that would allow Telmore to achieve these goals? MACH architecture. So it was only natural that they turned to the founders of the MACH Alliance: commercetools. Founded on the principles of providing a microservices, API, cloud-native, headless approach, commercetools was the best choice to modernize Telmore’s commerce architecture. For their frontend, Telmore chose fellow MACH enthusiasts Contentful and Vue Storefront.
During our process of choosing a new eCommerce solution, commercetools acted very professionally and with an impressive understanding of the industry, as well as the pain points our customers face with our current commerce solution. But even more importantly, the technology used by commercetools was the preferred choice by our IT architects and developers.
CIO, Telmore
With commercetools’ headless technology powering their backend, Telmore could now concentrate on bringing their content goals to life without ever disrupting their frontend, and get their commerce platform back on track to industry standards. Their time-to-market went from weeks to being almost instantaneous and they’ve taken back control by being able to provide the engaging, individualized customer experiences that they want to deliver, rather than being restrained by the limited options of their outdated monolithic system. In more ways than one, nothing is holding Telmore’s commerce solutions back now.
Learn more about why the future of telecom lives in the cloud and learn more about how the commercetools’ solution can help your business be successful in today’s challenging telecommunications industry.