The Client
The client is Europe’s leading independent retailer of train tickets. It sells tickets worldwide on behalf of 48 train companies, helping customers make more than 100,000 smarter journeys every single day in and across 24 countries. The company customizes their platforms for customer’s ease and comfort where they can offer them a set of travel options starting from buying train tickets online, on a mobile app with routes, fares and journey times.
The Challenges
The client aimed to unify and tie all travel services into one delightful experience for passengers that would ensure a positive user experience, effective business and value for time and money spent being innovative at the same time.
Technology Needs:
- The backend is re-engineered to support a modern, lightweight user interface over REST APIs.
- To develop a rich map-based front-end for the Web-based applications for their clients.
- To automate testing for greater quality and cost savings.
- To evaluate software under real user conditions and reduce modernization time and cost.
- Integration on-premise and cloud infrastructure as well as updating changes.
Business Needs:
- Increased ticketing sales.
- Make Repeated Business.
- Increased Revenue.
- Passenger Loyalty.
User Needs:
- Hassle-free ticketing.
- Quick, Easy Methods.
- Reliable Service from the client.
The Objective
The client desired to redesign the extended application functionality and modernize the User Experience to provide the user with the omnichannel experience. They sought to unlock the areas of advancement in order to deliver an exceptional experience to passengers and derive maximum business value. Hence the major objectives included:
- Moving from a monolithic User experience to an enriched & resilient UI developed on an open-source JavaScript platform.
- Migrating the Application to a Cloud-Based, highly optimized Microsoft Core Platform for superior performance.
- Introduction of scalable infrastructure platform to ensure Zero Down Time and thus create a compelling Differentiator for the client.
- Introduced flexible commute and payment options for the city- and country-wide use.
The Solution
JK Tech reimagined the e-commerce experience for the client while re-engineered restructuring the business processes in order to transform the customer experience and boost the revenue for the client and supporting £3+ Bn ticket sales through our dedicated ODC with demonstrated expertise in:
- UX Design
- Custom Development
- Mobility
- Testing
- DevOps
- Cloud-managed Services
We improved the UX design to create a smoother user flow between the core functions of the application like ticket booking and payment interface for ease of user experience and seamless ticket sales management. In addition, completely redesigned the visual interface to keep it at par with modern-day smartphone apps resulting in handling 3+ Million apps and website visits boost ticket sales. The robust application designed could handle 5X Expected Peak Traffic, rollback faster ensuring near-zero downtime and ensured overall application rates <0.3%. Moreover, keeping customers secure when they’re paying online is a must; JK Tech developed the solution compliant to 3DS V2, promoting passenger authentication and enabling consumers/passengers to authenticate themselves with their card issuer when making card-not-present (CNP) e-commerce purchases. We also ensure 360-degree Product Security DDoS Proofing Security Patching to make the service operable for consumers/passengers 24x7x365.
In addition, we:
- Developed Model View Controller-enabled and responsive front-end.
- Developed back-end following test-driven-development approach and maintaining strict adherence to Agile practices.
- Performed end-to-end automation testing following industry-standard practices.
- Performed agile development with a hybrid of Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) with DevOps as a catalyst. The mature agile distributed delivery model was customized according to the complexities of the application.
- Implemented Continuous Delivery practices for Continuous deployment purposes.
Our team followed the best engineering practices helping the client with diverse magnitude of iterative development, test automation, lean code and design. JK Tech analyzed the scope of work and followed the agile practices via latest audio/video conferencing system, joint retrospective with stakeholders and Effective team management.
The Benefits
JK Tech’s experience, expertise and knowledge, helped the client with business and IT alignment, shortened UAT cycles, increased revenue and market share thus providing better ROI for the client.
The major benefits included:
- Engineering moved towards continuous deployment and frequent releases.
- UX facelift led to a 7% increase in market size for the client.
- The application development and release cycle time were reduced by 70% with reduced time-to-market due to CI/CD.
- We leveraged the knowledge accumulated owing to 10+ years of association with the client to optimize the passenger’s journey and this effort boosted page conversion rates by an average of 10%.
- Overall, a 60% reduction in test cycle time due to automation provisioned in various stages was achieved.
- Accelerated passenger boarding times and improved operations and ticketing capacity.
- Reduced cash handling at kiosks and reduced waiting time for passengers for buying tickets while delighting passengers with additional features such as route planning services, view booking history, refund tickets, etc.
ROI
- 99% Faster Rollback which ensures near Zero downtime
- 7% UX facelift resulted in increase in Market size of client
- 70% Application development and release cycle time were reduced
