Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Serra Tech SA has been operating in Energy & Utilities for a while now, headquartered in Porto Alegre, Brazil. As Chief Digital Officer I sit across both strategic planning and day-to-day technology delivery. We hold our vendors to a high bar because our own clients hold us to one — it's only fair to expect the same discipline from partners.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulation in our Energy & Utilities segment shifted and the compliance deadline came from the regulator, not from us. The scale of the E-commerce Development changes required justified bringing in a specialist rather than pulling our internal team off the product roadmap to handle it.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope ran the full E-commerce Development lifecycle — discovery, requirements, architecture, development across roughly a dozen sprints, integration testing, performance validation, deployment, and a four-week hypercare window afterward. They also handed over full documentation and ran a knowledge transfer session for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We were coming off a failed engagement and went into vendor selection this time with a lot more scrutiny. We asked pointed questions about how they handle scope changes, how they estimate, how they communicate bad news. The answers were specific and consistent across everyone we spoke to on their team, which gave us confidence it wasn't a rehearsed pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thoroughly. The requirements document was detailed enough that our own QA team used it directly to build acceptance criteria. Every user story had a clear business reason attached, and nothing was left open to interpretation. That discipline early on paid off through the rest of development and testing.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Proactive and well-calibrated. Technical detail for the engineering side, plain summaries for the steering group, and risk flags that came with a proposed fix attached rather than just a problem statement. The biweekly sprint reviews kept our stakeholders in the loop without requiring them to sit in on every working session.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes to both. I'd quietly built in some contingency given the complexity and the number of integrations involved, and none of it ended up being needed. Delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice was within a rounding error of the approved budget — rarer than most people in this industry would admit.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate perfectly given everything else going on in the business, but the numbers we can attribute directly to the E-commerce Development work are solid: session duration up, conversion up, error rate down, and our NPS for that touchpoint has moved noticeably. Our account managers say it's coming up positively in client conversations now too.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their willingness to just be direct. If our requirements were unclear, they said so. If our priorities contradicted each other, they explained why. If an approach we'd assumed was right actually had real downsides, they told us before we'd committed to it. That kind of honesty is exactly what I look for in a long-term partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, no hesitation. I've already referred them twice within my own Energy & Utilities network, both times to people facing E-commerce Development problems similar to ours. I made those referrals confidently because I know the experience I had was repeatable, not a one-off stroke of luck on our project.