Introduction
Customized application developed for customer requests in three weeks.
About Klassik Radio
Klassik Radio
is a private radio station in Germany specialising in classical, film, and lounge music. The station can be heard on FM in over 300 German cities, on cable throughout Germany and on satellite throughout Europe. It is also streamed worldwide on the Internet.
The Challenge
Klassik Radio AG was faced with an enormous administrative effort as a result of the cancellation of physical events due to COVID security measures. The drastic cancellations and the successful booking rate of the planned events also meant that there was no way that it could be handled manually in a sufficient time.
More than 50,000 concert tickets sold through various platforms had to be exchanged or refunded. Based on this challenge, our experts started planning and developing a fully automated platform.
Klassik Radio AG, was one of the many companies that had to cancel their scheduled events due to the COVID-19 pandemic emerging in early 2020. Among events cancelled was the "Klassik Radio Live in Concert Tour".
The cancellation called for an enormous organisational administrative effort. Tickets that had already been purchased had to be cancelled and refunded. The objective of the project was to achieve this via an automated platform.
The Solution
The PCG X AWS in Germany took on the task of conceptualising and developing a platform through which ticket processing could be handled easily and quickly for the user, and with as little organisational effort for Klassik Radio AG as possible. Due to the temporary issue of high cancellation rates, it was decided to build the solution based on the extremely scalable Cloud Native services of AWS. Specifically, services such as Serverless, Amazon Lambda, and highly scalable fully-managed NoSQL databases from Amazon DynamoDB are used as the foundation for the platform.
During the development of the platform, the team was faced with the two main challenges. First, planning and development of the solution had to be done within a very short timeframe, as customer requests at Klassik Radio AG were increasing daily. Especially, the managed services of AWS supported an acceleration of the time-to-value here.
Another challenge was the heterogeneity of the tickets. Tickets were previously acquired through various providers, leading to a lack of uniformity in sales platforms and presentation. Services like Amazon Glue were employed to homogenize the data foundation. Consequently, the platform solution being developed had to seamlessly attribute each exchanged ticket to its respective seller.
Results and Benefits
We developed a platform true to the motto "native born in the cloud", and the basis for this platform was provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) web services.
This means that the entire application resides in the cloud and can thus be easily accessed from any location via any end device. The focus of the development was on implementing a simple and intuitive user interface so that customers could easily and quickly exchange the tickets they had already purchased.
A Management Board was also provided for Klassik Radio AG. Authentication was integrated through the existing identity provider to ensure easy administration of the platform. Thus, the customer enjoys Single Sign On and only one security compliance policy.
The following three options were offered to customers in the online store:
- Conversion of concert ticket from 2020 to 2021
- Exchange of tickets into a voucher with double value (e.g. ticket worth 70€ = voucher worth 140€)
- Exchange of tickets for a voucher with double value and a donation to the artists (e.g. ticket worth 70€ = voucher worth 140€ + 5€ donation to artists)
The kick-off meeting took place on 04.09.2020 and the launch of the finished platform on 01.10.2020. A Cloudstorming session was conducted to strategize and architect the project.
Richard Goerlich, Chief Content Officer | Managing Director Euro Klassik GmbH, on the collaboration:
"Due to the Corona-related cancellation of our nearly sold-out tour, we were confronted with a high amount of customer care and customer inquiries that we would not have been able to handle manually.
Thanks to the agile and flexible development of the application by the experts, we had a perfectly functioning platform within three weeks, which reduced our organisational effort by 70% and saved our customers stress and annoyance through a very straightforward process. In the meantime, almost 80% tickets have been processed via the new platform - number continuously increasing!"
About PCG
Public Cloud Group (PCG) supports companies in their digital transformation through the use of public cloud solutions.
With a product portfolio designed to accompany organisations of all sizes in their cloud journey and competence that is a synonym for highly qualified staff that clients and partners like to work with, PCG is positioned as a reliable and trustworthy partner for the hyperscalers, relevant and with repeatedly validated competence and credibility.
We have the highest partnership status with the three relevant hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft. As experienced providers, we advise our customers independently with cloud implementation, application development, and managed services.