Telenor achieves over 99% successful checkouts for 3M customers with Temporal

The Customer

Telenor is a leading telecommunications company in Sweden, offering a comprehensive range of services, including mobile and fixed-line telephony, broadband internet, and IPTV. Their mobile network covers 99.9% of Sweden's population, serving approximately 3 million mobile customers, around 700,000 fiber and broadband customers, and nearly half a million TV customers.

After coping with a complex IT environment caused by legacy systems and years of mergers and acquisitions, the consumer segment of Telenor adopted Temporal. In this story, we’ll explore in detail the challenges the team faced and how Temporal has provided significant business value.

The Challenge: Complex, Legacy Systems

Telenor Sweden was working on redesigning parts of their legacy systems, including their checkout and order intake system - a critical component that supported all sales and many customer lifecycle journeys across channels. This system needed to:

• Process sales orders reliably across all customer touchpoints
• Manage complex business rules that varied between channels
• Handle reservations, agreements, cash payments, bill account creation, and other CRM entities
• Ensure transaction resilience and prevent lost orders
• Scale to handle significant traffic spikes, particularly during events like iPhone launches

The existing checkout process had evolved organically over time without a clear architectural foundation. It had fallen between the cracks of their architecture, with logic duplicated and distributed among multiple teams and domains. Time to market for new features was slow and complex, and transactions were being lost due to the checkout process’s sequential, stateless nature.

This challenge emerged in the context of Telenor's complex IT landscape, resulting from multiple mergers and acquisitions since entering the Swedish market in 2005. Despite a successful digital transformation completed in 2019 that introduced an event-driven microservice architecture, their business continued evolving faster than their architecture could adapt, creating a growing misalignment.

Why should we spend a lot of time on technical complexity when, in the best of worlds, each line of code is directly delivering on a business process? We wanted more usability and less time spent on technical plumbing.

The Solution: Aligning Code to Business Processes

Telenor initially attempted to solve their checkout issues by designing a custom platform using state machines, rule engines, resilience libraries, and a homegrown task-based execution environment. However, they quickly recognized this approach was adding unnecessary technical complexity and taking the team’s attention away from the business logic.

They chose Temporal for several reasons:

• Focus on business logic, not plumbing: Temporal allowed developers to concentrate on implementing business processes rather than building complex technical infrastructure.
• Guaranteed process completion: Temporal ensured that even if services failed, Workflows would reliably complete.
• Durable state storage: State persistence meant they would never lose transaction progress, eliminating the problem of lost orders.
• Reusability across domains: Beyond checkout, Temporal provided a reusable solution for other domains with state management and durability needs.
• Common language: Temporal offered a shared vocabulary between business, architects, and developers, where business process steps could be clearly represented as Workflows and Activities.

Temporal has a cloud offering, which takes away the operational overhead from us, and they guarantee uptime. They take care of all the updates, security patching, and everything that comes with that. We can just benefit.

The Benefits: 15x better response time for checkouts

Telenor has achieved significant business value by adopting Temporal:

• Increased checkout success rate: By ensuring they never lost an order due to technical failures or network outages, Telenor eliminated lost revenue from failed transactions.
• Improved performance: Response time for checkouts improved by over 15 times, ensuring better customer and agent experiences.
• Enhanced scalability: During the annual iPhone launch (a major event with huge traffic spikes), Telenor successfully handled the significant increase in orders through their live systems, eliminating the need for separate campaign sites and manual order processing.
• Accelerated development: Teams using Temporal experienced improved development throughput with less time spent on technical infrastructure.
• Faster business responsiveness: With a more adaptable architecture, Telenor can respond more quickly to changes in business requirements.

These impacts directly supported Telenor's core business goals of selling more subscriptions with higher customer satisfaction at a lower cost.

We have found that Temporal is a value enabler, allowing us to focus on what is key to our business, to ensure adaptability in a changing business context. As per Temporal's promise (code-business logic, not plumbing) we can achieve our goal of delivering business value with every line of code.

The Takeaways

Through their experience implementing Temporal, Telenor gained several valuable insights:

• Business-architecture-code alignment is crucial: The gap between business needs, architectural design, and code implementation can significantly impact an organization's ability to adapt and deliver value.
• Code must be transparent: To support rapid business changes, code should be transparent and focused on business processes, making future modifications straightforward.
• Build vs. buy is not binary: The right approach isn't always to build everything or buy everything - solutions like Temporal offer a middle ground, allowing teams to adopt and subscribe while maintaining ownership of core business logic.
• Engineers should focus on business success: Organizations should focus development resources on what directly contributes to business success, not on reinventing technical infrastructure.

By aligning their technology implementation with business goals through platforms like Temporal, Telenor can deliver even greater value to their customers.

If you’re ready to achieve the same reliability and innovation for your team, try Temporal Cloud for free today with $1,000 in free credits.