MATRIXX Software - Innovation in Technology Development
Company: MATRIXX Software, San Francisco, CA USA
Category: Award for the Innovation in Technology Development > Telecommunications Industries
Nomination Title: giga! - Singapore’s First and Only Fully Digital Mobile Service
Essay:
The Singapore Telco market has experienced rapid change over the past few years. In just three years, the nation of six million people became one of the world’s most competitive mobile markets, going from zero mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) in 2016 to ten that exist today.
Millennials are an important, yet challenging demographic for telcos, accounting for 22% (1.2 million) of Singapore’s population. Steeped in a digital lifestyle, Millennials require different selling models, tactics and services compared to what mobile operators have relied upon in the past.
As one of the four major telcos in Singapore, Starhub is a leading homegrown brand that delivers world-class communications, entertainment and digital solutions. To keep up with the rapid changes happening in the mobile industry, Starhub wanted to create the country’s first-ever fully digital mobile brand to capture the hearts of Singapore’s millennials by offering a service that caters to their unique needs. Customer centricity, a bespoke end-to-end user experience, and customer flexibility were huge table stakes for Starhub.
In September 2018, Starhub partnered with MATRIXX Software, a company that provides telcos a commerce platform that enables rapid digital transformation to build giga! - a 100% fully digital technology stack completely independent from StarHub’s existing infrastructure. In just six months, four StarHhub women, plus two shared IT team members, launched the new brand, giga! By minimizing the connection to legacy infrastructure, simplifying the architecture and using a nimble, scalable and agile development methodology known as minimum viable product (MVP), MATRIXX enabled giga! to launch its new brand in record time and allowed Starhub to develop faster innovation products faster and better than the rest of the market.
MATRIXX Software enabled Starhub to:
- Launch Singapore’s first fully digital mobile service in under six months, providing consumers with a better, simpler, more intuitive mobile experience
- Provide its customers with complete freedom, with no contract plans that also provide generous amounts of data, talk time and SMS messaging to meet the needs of Millennials and heavy data users
- Offer digitized payments for customers to buy and pay for services quickly and easily
- Enable real-time ID verification with fraud detection capability
- the first telco in Singapore to launch digital verification
- Offer customers digital customer support. Giga!’s AI-powered chatbot named Gino can serve customers in their preferred channel, whether it’s Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, the giga! app or the web
- Offer lifestyle packs of fully configurable services that enable customers to buy as little or as much as they need. Giga! is the first mobile brand in Singapore to allow customers to hold onto their data. Giga!’s contract-free 25GB plan at $25 comes with 1000 minutes, 1000 SMSes, free data rollover (a unique feature only offered by giga!), free caller number display, and free incoming calls and SMS messages.
Today giga! has three plans, all of which are contract-free, come bundled with free local minutes and SMS, caller ID, incoming calls and SMS, no hidden fees, no excess charges or registration charges, and no deposits for foreigners. Customers pay only for what they need. The giga! app also allows customers to track their phone usage in real-time, purchase lifestyle packs, set personalized alerts, nicknames, and avatars -- another industry first in Singapore.
MATRIXX Software provided giga! with a flexible and robust online real-time monetization solution that helped giga! to launch quickly while providing the end-to-end user experience core to their mission. “We were very clear with our mission of providing customers with the best mobile service in an app and that meant real-time instantaneous activities and monitoring tools that empowered our customers to have total visibility and be in control of their service. MATRIXX has enabled this,” said Johan Buse, chief of consumer business group, StarHub.
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