MTS: An Ecosystem Pools Tool for All the Digital Products of MTS

by | Jun 13, 2023

Situation

The company: At MTS, the leading telecom company with 88 million users and a large digital ecosystem, I was a part of the MyMTS team.

The product portfolio:

MyMTS (30+ million MAU) is a self-service app. It was the #1 mobile app and #30 among all Russian apps (by AppStore ranking in 2018). MyMTS app is accompanied by the self-service websites: mts.ru and lk.mts.ru (10+ million MAU).

I managed a portfolio of these 3 B2C web and mobile products within the “Loyalty, ads, and targeted communications” vertical.

Context:

The colleagues from the quality department came to me and asked to integrate an NPS and tNPS (transactional NPS, touchpoint NPS) into MyMTS app and the self-service websites. The other MTS digital apps were the next in line in the quality department’s list for embedding NPS and tNPS polls.

The initial query from the quality department implied several constraints:

  • It was impossible to embed third-party software like Google Forms, Typeform, etc. due to the need to gather data internally due to security reasons.
  • The quality team expected to implement a set of polls for about 10 triggers, increase the number of triggers and experiment with the poll content rather often. Also, they planned to be able to change the poll content immediately.
  • The first solution that the colleagues expected looked like hard-coding the poll into our platforms. I suspected that it might be a bad solution and started my research.

Task

I had to understand:

  • How to implement this task with minimal effort from my product team,
  • Whether this change could have a positive impact on my products.

The key metrics I was targeting were:

  • Decreasing development costs,
  • Eliminating the need to involve my engineering team in the possible poll changes in the future.
  • Increase retention by collecting feedback right from the product after the key actions.

Action

I analysed:

  • The input from the quality department (their expectations about the poll, its triggers, questions, the frequency of its updates, etc.).
  • How the other departments create and manage polls.
  • I collaborated with the engineering team to understand the risks and technical challenges of integrating polls to MyMTS app and the web platforms.

Results

What were my takeaways from my research:

  • I realised that one department has been spending money every month to create polls using the external company.
  • I realised that the other department tried creating an internal pool instrument, but its functionality wasn’t enough for my goals.
  • I realised that hard-coding won’t be an option because:
    • MyMTS app, like all the other mobile apps, is a bundle of code that is uploaded to the app stores and, thus, this code can’t be changed right away.
    • The colleagues from the quality department expected to be able to change the content often.
  • I calculated the feature’s impact on my product portfolio, consulted with the engineering team and realised that a separate internal tool should have been launched.
  • I created the architecture of that tool:
    • The user-facing part: how to embed the poll to the apps to make this flow universal for all the other web and mobile apps of the whole MTS ecosystem.
    • The admin panel for changing the content, launching new polls, etc. The admin panel had to have different roles and different access levels for the colleagues of the quality department and the Product Managers of each product (to ensure the best UX possible and no surprises for the PM).
    • The server part (the internal service that is in the core of the polls system).
    • The integration part (first of all – through Google Tag Manager, later – through SDKs for web and apps).
  • I returned to the colleagues from the quality department with the results of my research.
  • I helped them to find a budget for building a separate service for polls. I justified the need to build a separate service instead of the recurring costs of the company for the polls across the company.

The separate service with a server part, an admin panel, and the integration part has been launched, and after that, I curated integrating that service, MTS Polls, to MyMTS and the self-serve websites. The integration took minimal time for the MyMTS engineering team.

That tool became an eco-system module that is now integrated into several mobile apps and websites within MTS digital portfolio. That tool saved several thousands of dollars due to stopping monthly spending by the other departments and a one-time investment in the all-in-one tool. And the tools in now used not only for the NPS/tNPS polls, but also for all the other customer-facing polls.

As a result:

  • The development costs from my engineering team were minimal.
  • The company’s ROI and P&L for this initiative were positive.
  • My portfolio’s retention increased by collecting feedback right from the product after the key actions and planning the product changes accordingly.

Period

2018-2020