Since 2009, Quoin has supported Comporium Communications, a 120-years-old diversified communications company offering a full range of services including Internet, TV, phone, wireless, and home security/automation. A respected regional provider with a devoted customer base, Comporium was looking to update its system portfolio and elevate its customer offerings to increase competitiveness in today’s always-connected world. 

As part of modernizing its internal and customer systems, Quoin was engaged on three long-term projects: Quoin designed and implemented a responsive new eCommerce platform, which enabled customers to easily purchase or upgrade services. We also supported the integration of a commercial Business Support System (BSS), including defining the integration architecture and integrating eCommerce with this new system. Finally, we are building a new Customer Support System (CSS) that will enable customers to manage accounts and pay online and is being implemented as a progressive web application (PWA).

Throughout each of these projects, we provided technical and project leadership for a joint client-Quoin IT team to ensure successful implementations. These new apps will enable Comporium to provide a modern interface, seamless web/mobile user experience, and comprehensive self-service features. 

Quoin built a sophisticated eCommerce platform that provides an engaging new user interface and integration with Comporium’s legacy systems. Our team focused on the development of the eCommerce user interface and client application. During this 12-month project, we collaborated with the Comporium department that implements services in order to access back-end systems for account management, product catalog, and other functions. Quoin continued to provide support for maintenance, development of new features, and knowledge transfer for a year after the platform’s release.

The new eCommerce site allows consumers to browse, configure options, select add-on services, and checkout seamlessly – improving customer experience and reducing the need to interact with a customer support representative. A key component of the client application is the editing feature developed by the Quoin team. Early in the project, we realized that marketing staff would need to edit promotional content and this content did not naturally complement the structure of product data. We, therefore, built a simplified content management function to allow authorized users to change promotional images and copy within the client application. 

eCommerce Architecture

The project introduced new technologies at Comporium for the front-end - React and Redux - as well as new hosting and infrastructure tools. The front-end of the eCommerce application is served from a set of EC2 instances. Each instance runs the Nginx web server within a Docker container. In this deployment architecture, Nginx has two roles: it both serves the application's main HTML page and JavaScript bundle and acts as a proxy for the back-end services. Assets such as CSS, images, and JavaScript are distributed by the CloudFront CDN. CloudFront is backed by S3 storage. 

In line with Comporium’s mission to deliver the latest technology to its customers, Quoin was engaged to design and implement a progressive web application (PWA) for an enhanced Customer Self-Service (CSS) experience. While the eCommerce site was built as a mobile-first responsive web application, the CSS application will be a cutting-edge solution that caters to customers’ desire for simplicity, efficiency, and constant mobility. The new apps will also give existing customers the ability to pay bills and manage their accounts through a customizable My Account feature.

The PWA will essentially be an extension of Comporium’s existing modern web application, but will additionally support basic offline capabilities and app-like elements such as push notifications. Our goal is to provide a single code base that works as both a traditional website and a mobile app, resulting in a user experience that emphasizes greater consistency and predictability. In particular, the PWA will feature integrated services architecture for Business Support Systems (BSS) and Self Service. Quoin is ensuring that this newest addition to Comporium’s enterprise portfolio is in line with the latest technological advances. 

We are currently in the architecture phase of a project for Comporium Communications, which includes the implementation of a headless CMS using Genetics Mesh to manage telecommunications product data, including descriptive text, images, package, and pricing information. Moreover, this headless implementation will provide a long-term solution for enterprise content management, functioning as a content repository for operational systems, including customer service and operations. As part of our responsibilities, our project team created detailed instructions for the build and deployment process, as well as delivered content author training.

Quoin also led the enterprise-wide integration of Comporium’s commercial Business Support System (BSS), which encompassed a wide range of legacy applications and internal services departments. Our work included integrating the BSS with a commercial back-office support system, as well as with the web-based eCommerce platform and the Customer Self-Service PWA. 

Quoin understood that the complexity of Comporium’s enterprise system required extensive and diligent backend work. To implement the BSS transformation successfully, Quoin’s technologists focused on streamlining various technological and process mismatches between Comporium applications and services, such as differences in customer creation, currency handling, order processing, pricing, and other business workflows. Throughout the project, we collaborated with the client’s IT team to establish an integration services layer to reduce coupling between the over 25 interdependent legacy applications. We also used a business logic layer to enable reusability.