Digicel is a Telecom Operator operating in 33 markets across the Caribbean, Central America, and Oceania regions. A key market in Digicel’s portfolio is Panama where they are the challenger brand in a highly competitive four-player market.
One of Digicel Panama’s goals was to provide its customers with a personalized and differentiated digital experience through a highly engaging mobile application.
Engaged customers have better ARPU and lower churn, so increasing the number of customers using the app on a daily basis became a strategic imperative.
Situation
Before partnering with LotusFlare, Digicel Panama had a Group developed self-care app for its customers. The Group app was not customized for Panama, it lacked advanced features intended to engage customers and, as a result, Monthly Active Users (“MAUs”) steadily decreased over time.
In parallel to a major 4G network investment and a mandate from the board to increase market share, Digicel Panama needed dramatically upgrade their digital customer experience.
Digicel realized they had an opportunity to do much more than update the MyDigicel UX/UI. They wanted to provide app-only offers, enable new payment methods, and launch a contextual engagement and rewards program. Alongside the ARPU and churn goals Digicel added cost savings (recharges done through the app have half the commissions of recharges done in physical channels) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) improvement goals. The new MyDigicel app became a key element in Digicel Panama’s strategy to become a digital operator.
Solution
MyDigicel is the focal point of LotusFlare’s partnership with Digicel Panama. The iOS and Android applications were designed, developed, tested and launched over a four month period. The new MyDigicel app was developed in native iOS and Android development frameworks, with the latest SDKs and performant APIs. The product is hosted on the public cloud ensuring a stable infrastructure that can auto-scale as users and traffic increase.
“Our customers have high expectations for their digital experience. We chose LotusFlare because they enabled us to fast-track our product development and growth, making it possible to become the leader for digital customer experience in Panama.” – Simon Baldwin, Chief Commercial Officer, Digicel Panama
The new MyDigicel app allows Digicel Panama customers to perform core self-care activities such as:
- Monitor their prepaid account balance.
- Check data, voice and SMS consumption on a postpaid plan.
- Easily activate and deactivate new plans.
- Top up your own account and other accounts, pay your bill and other accounts bills.
- Purchase plans and subscribe to recurrent bill payments.
- Top-up or pay account bills for friends and family.
- View the latest news and promotions from Digicel.
- Read, download and pay bills using a credit card in the app.
- Perform total or partial payments to other accounts.
- Store Locator to find Digicel shops, chat to easily reach customer support, manage personal information and other.
Digicel Panama has seen dramatic results just a few months after launching the enhanced MyDigicel app.
- 8% higher ARPU and 12% lower churn for customers who are active users of the MyDigicel app, compared to customers who do not use the app.
- Average of 20% monthly increase in active users since January 2020.
- Reduced calls to the call center for customers who use the app.
- Cost savings from in-app recharges which are 50% of the cost of recharges performed in retail stores.
Digicel and LotusFlare have plans for more unique digital offers to further enhance active users, ARPU and customer retention. These three metrics have a direct accretive impact on Digicel’s top line and bottom lines.
In addition to customer offers the team is looking at ways to digitize the legacy backend so that Digicel’s digital operator strategy is underpinned with best in class digital enablers.
With a strong foundation in place, Digicel aims to grow market share and become a lighthouse for other Digicel Group operators to execute on a successful digital strategy.
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