Case Study

Number Owner Change

Changing the owner of a phone number used to require a trip to a store and often held up switching from other operators. I designed an online flow from scratch, for both individuals and legal entities, to bring in more new customers.

The problem

MTS already had a draft solution for changing the owner of a number, but it was still raw.

It did not distinguish between scenarios for individuals and legal entities
The path was unclear to both parties
Identity and document verification was done manually — with errors, repeated attempts and no visibility of the request status

Yet changing the owner of a number is not a formality but often a hidden barrier when switching from another operator: if the number is legally registered to someone other than the person who wants to keep it, they either get stuck at this step or never make the switch to MTS at all.

How I solved it

Research

I studied the existing work and user behavior to understand where and why people abandon the process.

Two separate flows

I designed two separate flows from scratch — for individuals and for legal entities — with clearly defined roles for the current and the new owner, step-by-step statuses and clear document requirements at every step.

Built on Gosuslugi

I built the flow on top of Gosuslugi: the integration greatly simplifies identity verification and the consent of both parties, removing most of the manual checks that used to require a trip to a store.