SaskTel

Client Overview

SaskTel is Saskatchewan’s leading telecommunications provider, serving over a million customers across consumer and business lines. For years, both audiences were managed through the same digital ecosystem, one portal, one app, one set of assumptions. It was a practical approach that worked when expectations were lower and the experience surface was simpler.

As self-serve became the primary channel for billing, support, and account management, that model started to strain. Consumer and business needs were diverging, but the system still treated them as one. SaskTel responded by separating the two into distinct divisions. The experience was still catching up.

Challenge

The issue wasn’t a single product. SaskTel’s portal, mobile app, website, and payment systems had been built and evolved separately, but customers experienced them as one. That gap showed up most clearly around billing and payments. Users were pushed between environments, forced to reorient, and often left unsure of what they owed or what would happen next.

What made it difficult was that these weren’t isolated issues. The experience was tied to legacy systems and third-party dependencies that couldn’t simply be redesigned or replaced. Improving one part of the journey exposed gaps in another, including for internal teams trying to support customers. The problem wasn’t usability in the conventional sense. It was structural.

Solution

Consumer and business paths were separated where the differences were unavoidable, such as billing structures, account management, and service complexity, while continuing to share a common foundation elsewhere. Treating them as entirely distinct systems would have introduced a different kind of overhead without resolving the core issue.

Billing was where users felt it most. Customers experienced it as part of SaskTel, but key parts of it were handled by a third-party system. Moving users out of the experience to complete a payment created hesitation at a point where clarity mattered most. Instead of replacing the billing engine, its functionality was brought into the product through integration. The underlying system remained in place, but the experience of it changed.

We worked inside SaskTel’s product teams, contributing directly to ongoing releases rather than operating as a separate stream. Design decisions were shaped alongside technical and operational constraints as they surfaced.

Other changes followed the same pattern. Navigation shifted away from internal terminology toward language customers already use. The internal admin tool was adjusted to reflect the same views customers see, reducing gaps between support and experience. In the mobile app, stability was prioritized over adding new functionality.

The complexity is still there. It just sits behind the interface now.