How Vodafone Boosted Retention by 50%

Customers were dropping off, reviews were slipping, and the app had stopped delivering value. Rebuilding it meant restoring trust—one interaction at a time.

Learn How We Built the Vodaphone App

Meet Vodafone

Vodafone sits at the centre of everyday life for millions of customers. Mobile plans, data usage, payments, and rewards all flow through a single relationship.

That relationship increasingly lived inside the app. It was where customers checked usage during a commute, paid bills late at night, or explored new offers between meetings.

When that experience broke down, it didn’t stay contained to the product. It showed up in reviews, in lost engagement, and in missed revenue.

A customer experience that decreased engagement

The app stopped feeling like a service. It felt like effort.

Customers disengaged, and the business lost one of its most direct channels to them.

A Product That Felt Outdated

Simple updates took weeks to release. What should have been quick improvements became delayed fixes, leaving the experience stuck in the past.

Friction at Every Step

Customers entered the app with intent—pay a bill, check rewards—but lost momentum halfway through. Flows felt inconsistent, forcing users to stop and rethink what should have been obvious.

Systems That Didn’t Speak to Each Other

Rewards, payments, and customer data existed in isolation. Customers felt that disconnect every time something didn’t update or sync the way they expected.

Interest Without Action

Customers were opening the app, but not completing actions. Traffic was there. Conversions weren’t.

Our app was almost unusable in today's market and we had the engagement data and reviews to prove it.

The app stopped being a growth channel. It became a liability—costing engagement, weakening customer trust, and limiting how quickly the business could launch new offers.

The decision to rebuild wasn’t straightforward.

The risk wasn’t just rebuilding. The bigger risk was continuing with a product that customers were already abandoning.

Will we find an agency that can handle a project of this size and address all our concerns?
With such a complex project, this could easily run overtime and over budget.
We’ve already invested heavily in the current app—what if this fails again?

Three moments that built trust

The partnership worked because it stayed grounded in real use.

Seeing Through the Customer's Eyes

The team didn't start with our feature backlog. They started by watching real customers use the existing app — where they paused, where they rethought, where they gave up. The insight that customers were using "three apps, not one" came from that observation, not from our brief.

No Surprises Along the Way

Every trade-off was walked through before a decision was made. When performance constraints required cutting a feature from the first release, we knew the reasoning, the alternatives considered, and the plan to add it back. No black-box decisions. No scope arguments at handover.

Business and Product in Sync

Every feature shipped connected back to a retention, engagement, or conversion metric — and the analytics layer was built from day one to prove it. By launch, we weren't guessing whether the rebuild had worked. We could see it.

The design started with how customers actually used the app

Before redesigning a single screen, the EB Pearls team spent time watching real Vodafone customers use the existing app. How they moved between tasks. Where they paused. Where they gave up.

Everyone had assumed the problem was the interface — that customers needed a cleaner, faster, more modern UI to re-engage. What the team found was something different.

Payments, rewards, and account management had been built as separate products bolted together. Customers didn't experience them that way. They opened the app to top up credit, check what rewards that earned them, and update their plan — one continuous journey, in their heads.

The app made them start over at every step. Different navigation patterns. Different load states. Data that didn't carry across. Every handoff between modules was a moment where momentum broke and customers dropped out.

The insight was simple: stop designing modules, start designing journeys. Once payments, rewards, and account flowed as one experience, the usability problem solved itself.

“The team didn't just respond to requirements, they connected customer needs with business goals in a way others hadn't articulated.”

— Vodafone

Built around the customer, not the software

The focus shifted from redesigning screens to rebuilding how the entire system worked underneath.

Customer Mobile App (Multi-Type Users)

A single app serving pre-paid, post-paid, and broadband customers — each seeing a tailored experience without three separate codebases to maintain. Built in Flutter for cross-platform deployment across iOS and Android with one release cycle.

Unified Journey Architecture

Payments, rewards, and account management rebuilt as one connected flow rather than three bolted-together modules. This was the structural fix the reframe demanded — not better screens, but shared state that carries across every handoff.

Rewards Program Integration

Rewards are directly linked to customer accounts and transaction events, so earning and redemption happen in-flow rather than in a separate module. No more manual reconciliation, no more customers wondering where their points went.

Payment Functionality

Streamlined in-app payments with fewer steps, clearer confirmation states, and retry logic built for Pacific network conditions — where dropped connections mid-transaction were a leading cause of abandoned top-ups.

Analytics Layer

Event tracking built into every journey from day one. This is how we knew the rebuild had worked — and how Vodafone's team now identifies drop-offs in hours rather than waiting for the next quarterly review.

Data Connection Layer

Centralised data flow between payments, rewards, CRM, and billing, so a change in one system propagates everywhere it's needed. The old architecture kept these in isolation; customers felt every seam.

Fixing What Slows People Down

01 Improving the app without starting again The app was already in use every day. Rebuilding it would create disruption, not progress.

02 Finding where users were getting stuck There were no clear errors. Users were dropping off mid-task, often pausing or abandoning simple actions like top-ups.

03 Making speed work in low connectivity In slower network conditions, even small delays made tasks feel harder than they should.

04 Simplifying without removing features The app already did a lot. The challenge was to make it easier to use without taking anything away.

The before and after, in numbers

The app moved from slow and frustrating to fast and intuitive. The impact showed up quickly—and kept compounding as more users engaged, transacted, and returned.

Metric	Before	After · EB Pearls
User Engagement	Lower engagement due to friction in flows	+34% Increased
Transaction Speed	Slower transactions, affected by load times	29% faster
Customer Retention	Users dropped off due to usability issues	+50% boost

5.0

What stood out straight away was how clear they were on cost. We got a realistic estimate early, understood what was included, and there were no hidden extras later. As part of our research process, we received a few vague quotes from other agencies. When comparing these to EB Pearls’ transparent costing, it was a no-brainer.

Shimneet Chand, —Digital Transformation Lead, Vodafone

What was once a barrier became a reason to stay.

Before

“Our app was almost unusable in today's market.”

After

"Now its usability sets the benchmark."

Before the rebuild, the app lost users at key moments—payments and rewards felt disconnected, leading to drop-offs.

After launch, those journeys became seamless and predictable. Customers moved effortlessly between actions, while teams gained clearer visibility into user behaviour.

With connected data and flexible architecture, the app is no longer a constraint—it’s a platform the team can continuously evolve, not just maintain.

Ready to Elevate Your App Experience?

If your platform feels more complex than it should—or your users are quietly slipping away—it might be time for a fresh perspective.

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