Microsoft AI Builder Improves Business Processes with Prebuilt Models
Microsoft AI Builder helps streamline business processes with prebuilt models, practical use cases, and low-code tools.
bswift Achieves 2,400% Mobile App Growth and #1 Industry Rating
Read time:
At a Glance
As mobile experience became a critical driver of engagement and retention, bswift partnered with Centric Consulting to elevate its mobile benefits app to enterprise-grade quality and scale. The partnership delivered measurable gains in quality, speed, and reliability — transforming the app into a primary engagement channel.
When bswift, a leading provider of cloud-based benefits technology and engagement solutions, rebuilt its mobile application to meet top-of-market standards, the company needed more than developers. It needed the right partner.
Within 18 months, Centric Consulting helped bswift become the No. 1 user-rated mobile app in the benefits administration space, earning 4.9 and 4.8-star ratings on Apple and Google’s app stores, respectively. Downloads surged 2,400 percent, from 20,000 to more than half a million, and user reviews grew 10x to more than 21,000 — up from only 2,000 on the previous app.
The Challenge: Modernizing at Enterprise Scale
Founded in 2000, bswift simplifies benefits administration for employers and improves benefits engagement for employees nationwide. In an industry where mobile experience increasingly drives competitive differentiation and client retention, the company needed to deliver a seamless digital experience that today’s employees expect.
As mobile became a key modality for employees to engage with their benefits, whether during enrollment or in their daily lives, bswift invested in rebuilding its mobile application on new technology. The company successfully launched the app to market, but recognized the need to continue maturing it for enterprise-level use.
“The challenge we threw in front of Centric was that we’ve created this consumer-grade modern app, and it is key to ensure we continue to drive high standards in security, maintainability, and scalability to deliver at enterprise scale,” said Becky Whitehead, EVP of Engineering at bswift.
More importantly, bswift didn’t want a traditional staff augmentation model. “We wanted to ensure we had a partnership with the same sense of ownership and accountability for the success of our mobile app,” Whitehead explained.
The Right Partner Co-Owns the Project
Every single member on that team acted like they owned the project. They brought ideas and raised risks with ideas of how to fix it. They really took the time to learn the end-user perspective, and they came with their own perspectives.
The Solution: Partnership Over People in Seats
Centric approached the engagement with a managed services model focused on business outcomes rather than resource allocation. The team, comprised of program managers, scrum masters, technical leads, front- and back-end developers, and manual and automation quality analysts, took over the mobile app and immediately began establishing the foundations for enterprise-scale quality, applying proven agile practices and frameworks.
The solution centered on four key areas:
Automated Testing Framework
Centric implemented comprehensive test automation using pre-built automation frameworks to accelerate development. The team created custom automated test suites for both smoke and regression testing. This resulted in automated test coverage that went from zero to 97 percent within the first year.
The automated regression testing framework eliminated the need for intensive manual regression testing, which previously required hours of work before each release. More importantly, it gave the team confidence that new code wouldn’t break existing features, noted Kara Leslie, Portfolio Manager of Employee Experience at bswift.
The code coverage improvements translated to improved production quality. “The last couple of production releases had zero product defects,” Leslie said. “That’s unheard of.”
Release testing time dropped from hours to only 30 minutes.
Quality Gates
Centric helped the bswift team pioneer quality gates, establishing code quality standards that required all code to pass specific checks before being committed, driving up quality and eliminating security vulnerabilities.
CI/CD Pipelines with Azure DevOps
Centric implemented Microsoft Azure DevOps for dashboards, reporting, and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, enabling automated, on-cadence deployments and “release on demand” capabilities. The team integrated real-time app monitoring and rapid issue resolution, while establishing bi-weekly and quarterly metrics reporting on velocity, cycle time, throughput, defect density, and defect seepage with yearly improvement targets.
AI-Powered Development
For the first time, GitHub Copilot was used in the software development life cycle at bswift, pioneering AI-assisted development for their entire organization. As early adopters, the team helped bswift navigate the learning curve of integrating AI code assist tools into engineering practices.
“The team was cutting-edge on this,” Leslie noted. “They set a precedent for everybody else.”
The implementation delivered a 30 percent increase in efficiency and throughput while reducing defects by 30 percent through improved unit testing.
Additionally, Centric established standards and best practices that bswift teams could follow, helping the organization understand how to effectively use AI tools in day-to-day mobile app development work.
“Centric was key to helping us move that initiative forward with rolling out those tools,” Whitehead said.
Vinita Pilani, Senior VP of Product Engineering at bswift, said consistency has defined bswift’s relationship with Centric.
“Throughout these two years, Centric has consistently exceeded all quality and velocity targets, demonstrating outstanding collaboration with our product strategy and technical leadership teams,” she said.
By The Numbers
0%
increase in downloads
#0
rated app in benefits administration
0%
automated testing coverage
0%
increase in velocity
Beyond the Metrics
In addition to achieving the No. 1 user-rated mobile app in the benefits administration space and transforming development quality and efficiency, the partnership unlocked new business opportunities and strategic value for bswift.
New capabilities, particularly the addition of managed billing within the app, enabled bswift to better serve all of its clients’ populations. The feature opened access to COBRA and retiree populations who typically lack access to corporate credentials like work email addresses. By enabling the use of alternative methods like Face ID to log in, they can access their benefits even without their former corporate credentials.
“The app is now one of our main sources for engagement,” Leslie explained, adding that the ability to pay bills in the app is the most frequently mentioned feature in App Store reviews.
“Over 18 months, the team completed 15 successful production releases while delivering to commitment 100 percent of the time. The mobile codebase exceeded all established benchmarks, positioning the team as a consistent top performer at bswift,” Pilani said.
Expanding Partnership
The mobile app’s success laid the foundation for an expanding partnership. bswift brought Centric back to help mature testing and automation capabilities across the entire technology organization, taking the relationship well beyond the original mobile app work.
Committed at Every Level
Centric focuses on building the partnership. They’re really committed at all levels of the org for our success. That’s a pretty big differentiation versus other companies we’ve worked with in the past.
