How might we...run interactive events that delight our users without pushing them (and losing them) to another events website

A client was developing and running a new way to market their services to a wide client base. A central part of their strategy was to run interactive events online that built relationships with existing and prospective clients. Their existing solution pushed users out of their application and they were finding that one of their main strategic priorities was actually proving to be a session-ender! Furthermore, their in-house development team was focussed on run priorities, without the investigative capabilities to properly look into the opportunity.

Spike Squad were presented with a relatively well defined challenge on this occasion. User research and business proposal were in agreement, the technology with which we would need to integrate was established and the code base was stable and of good quality. The CTO wanted a discrete Proof of Concept to understand what was achievable, and to arm himself with all of the 'evidence' required to secure funding for development of the potential new feature. As such, Spike Squad's brief was not only focussed on technology selection and deployment, but also on demonstrating to the board what it could look like and how it would 'wow' users.

Our two week PoC yielded an industry first concept, leveraging Azure Communication Services in an entirely new way. Anyone could run the events via their existing Teams application (using our clients existing licence) while the in-app experience for users was innovative, exciting and completely joined up with the rest of their in-app activities. As a bonus, we investigated and demonstrated how public users could be assigned different permissions, allowing the levels of contribution to be managed by our client, which opened up possibilities for their proposed future foray into tiered access rights. The positive outcomes blew our objectives out of the water and the delivery of a production-ready solution has since been picked up and completed by the in-house team.

Why the Business loved it

• Great host and attendee user experience with no new software training required
• Fully integrated and best-in-class in-app events platform for enterprise use, with white-label sales options!
• Motivated and unleashed engineering team working with alliance partners on innovative, game-changing features

Why the Engineers loved it

• The team were able to leverage bleeding-edge technology which facilitated a clear separation between hosting and joining meetings
• Leveraging an existing product to host the events reduced the overhead for the engineering team and allowed them to focus on making the in-event experience engaging for users
• Pre-built UI components were available to bring into the solution, saving time and complexity