Discover the electrifying journey of MobileAP, led by a dynamic all-woman team from Customer Services of AP DU: Melody, Arlene, Coleen, and Rowena. Embodying resilience and innovation, their commitment to excellence propel them to overcome challenges and bring groundbreaking results.
As MobileAP evolves, they remain dedicated to enhancing its functionality, promising a bright future of streamlined efficiency in utility services. Dive deeper into their transformative story with invaluable lessons for continuous growth and sparking positive change within our organization and communities.
Our story is not just a story of an app. It’s about AP DU’s transformation, which continues to happen to this day.
Our MobileAP story started as an idea that came to life in support of the Aboitiz Group’s digitalization strategy. It’s the key channel differentiator for AP DU when the development started way back in 2018. When the pandemic hit, the app was fast tracked and went live in April 2020 for Visayan Electric and Davao Light initially, allowing customers to view their bills and payments among others and allowing our DU Operations Team to deliver bills without risking the health of our DU teams and delivery partners.
The innovation didn’t stop there as 2021 marked the rebrand of MobileAP with better security features and extended its coverage to the Cotabato Light and Subic Enerzone DUs. Fast forward to today, MobileAP has undergone countless improvements and iterations to cater to our customer’s ever changing needs.
How we got to where we are now has been a journey and not something that happened overnight. And we’re not even there yet.
In the last quarter of 2022, we made a great push and decision to embrace agile. In partnership with ISG, our core team underwent DevSecOps Training; and with HR’s Training offerings, we were able to attend a detailed Scrum Master Training, with Rowena Getutua, our Scrum Master getting her certification.
There were countless challenges. It was not a walk in the park. The lesson is to prepare the team to embrace the change including its bumps, and then work on solutions together as a team. Everybody gets to speak up and provide their input, and depending on where one came from, that can be a change for them. Another important lesson is how critical leaders alignment is for this change to happen. The trainings are a great way to start, but doing it – that’s where actual change happens.
The lesson is to prepare the team to embrace the change including its bumps, and then work on solutions together as a team.
Through an agile mindset, the MobileAP project maximized resource utilization and delivered a working product despite the challenges of the pandemic and the new challenges now of fast tracking digitalization.
- The app prevented safety and health risks on both employees and customers by providing a digital channel for bill delivery. Now, customers are able to access their bill anytime, anywhere.
- We were able to simplify the processes of requirements gathering through product backlog refinement sessions.
- The product demos empowered the team to show-and-tell what they have done, and the rest of the team to give their feedback.
This also fosters trust and accountability for each member of the team. MobileAP is playing a crucial role in driving and reinforcing the purpose of transforming energy in several ways. For one, the app provides customers with billing transparency and insights into their energy consumption, helping them identify opportunities to reduce energy consumption and encourage responsible energy use.
What’s more to that is:
- The project is on its way to realizing PHP 2.6M savings per month for 500K DU account registrations on paper bill production and delivery. Aside from the monetary savings, it’s important to mention the impact it has on the environment, which is important to us as Aboitiz Group.
- We save PHP 2 for every payment done through the app.
- We’ve also enabled convenient payment via online channel for the customers (UBP, BPI, and RCBC). Working closely with our Bill2Cash team, we are on our way to expanding the payment channels in the app.
- Speaking of Bill to Cash, our latest version now makes our third party payment processing more efficient by taking the processing time from 27 hours per month down to seconds. Now, it’s time saved and reallocated to more productive tasks.
- We intend to build and integrate other services or mini-apps within MobileAP’s ecosystem to expand the range of services, functionalities, and products we can offer.
The app also gave way for the company to get data-driven insights. By analyzing user data, it can provide valuable insights for improvement internally and can also be shared to policymakers and industry experts to help in the overall sustainability goal.
It helps us sleep peacefully at night knowing that the team is making an impact in the lives of the customers we serve.
MobileAP was created with the convenience of the customers in mind. It was an idea from several brilliant minds who have already begun the transformation. As AP DU progresses, this app will continue to evolve to become the future and standard of utility apps in the nation.
- The long term vision for MobileAP is to be a super app, building opportunities to offer more products and services to our customers, while being able to earn and monetize from its features.
While on our way there, the team continues to build on the app, focusing on what the customers need and contributing to improving the customers’ daily lives, all with the goal of empowering the evolution of our cities, in support of our purpose as 1AP.
- MobileAP allows our customers to do more things that really matter in their lives, because if you’ve seen one of our videos, it says in the end – life is too short to stand in lines.
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