Modernizing Ticket Sales and Customer Services in Azure

To reliably provide its fans with unforgettable sporting events, Atlético Nacional partnered with SoftwareONE* to create a customizable subscriber and sporting event management application in the cloud. With fast, simple, and individually tailored online ticket sales, the soccer club has built a new and better customer loyalty experience.

The integrated online platform instantly provides crucial data for analysis and has reduced operational costs while growing ticket sales and helped Atlético Nacional provide fans with more convenient and individualized access to great sporting events.

*SoftwareONE and InterGrupo have engaged into a commercial partnership since 2019. In November 2020, SoftwareONE has announced that it has agreed to fully acquire InterGrupo.

The professional soccer club Atlético Nacional is a consistently strong leader in Colombia sports entertainment. Founded in 1947 and based in Medellín, it has won numerous league and international titles, making it one of the most successful teams in Colombia and Latin America.

The entertainment sector has been transforming to serve the needs of a new generation seeking to customize personal interactions. They want simplified online entertainment information access. The challenge has been to create new offerings that are personalized, fast, and easy to use. Companies are helping individual customers select events, seating, and amenities when buying a subscription or ticket.

Atlético Nacional has made significant investments in digital transformation since 2016, and in partnership with SoftwareONE, has optimized its customer offerings. It has changed its traditional physical ticket sales approach sharing commissions with brokers. The move to a cloud-based application has improved the purchasing and logistics experiences for fans, while increasing sales and providing key fan analytics data. The new solution also increases revenues by eliminating ticket agents as well as combating unauthorized ticket resale and counterfeiting.

Atlético Nacional engaged SoftwareONE to create and implement an integrated system in the Azure cloud to optimize its services and centralize processes.

The new system:

• Automates management and sale of season tickets and individual box office transactions, eliminating manual processes and minimize administrative costs.
• Helps administer and analyze user data, including optimizing control, management, and centralization of information for improved decision-making.
• Avoids dependence on third parties to monitor data and helps to resolve problems in real-time.
  
• Facilitates fan loyalty while speeding and improving pass and ticket purchases.
• Improves processes and reduces administration for collections, top-ups, stadium income, and subscription renewals.
• Integrates many disparate systems into one cloud-based platform

SoftwareONE designed and implemented the integrated platform based on native cloud architecture to provides an end-to-end solution using Microsoft.Net technology and an Azure-hosted SQL Server relational database. Fans can manage their individual information, including seat-assignments, and the club manages ticket sales and collections.

The system generates reports for better decision-making, as well as application and data security, fan authentication, and administrative user identification.

The system's QR generation component is implemented for the virtual box office, which provides better control, validation, and agility to manage tickets entering the stadium. It also prevents ticket counterfeiting and unauthorized reselling.

• From 2016 to 2020, the sale of online subscriptions has grown from 20% to 55%.
• The QR box office's sale had a first-time acceptance of 20% in 2019 and growth today at 40%.
• The current solution is 100% owned by Atlético Nacional and allows direct management of the application and information with complete autonomy.
• After application implementation and early public acceptance, more than 3,000 subscriptions were sold in a single day.
• Improved understanding of the customer market and opportunities for growth are supported by optimized management, centralization and analysis of information, and user data that makes it easier to predict revenues.
• The platform’s architecture is a cost-effective cloud solution based on Microsoft Azure. It easily adapts to new needs, minimizing impacts on the expense, time, and resources required to implement changes in the design and addition of new features and capabilities.
• The system's cloud monitoring and administration models guarantee availability and optimization of resources at the most critical moments, such as recharges, and purchase of season tickets. Atlético Nacional fans have a better user experience entering the stadium, and administrative users have easy access to information in real-time.
• The application has reinvented the box office, including individual ticket sales, season tickets, and implementation of secure online payment.
• Customer satisfaction, sales, and revenue all exceeded expectations for the 2018 Soccer World Cup final.