Luxury car dealership delivers a seamless customer journey
Luxury car dealership delivers a seamless customer journey
REGION
Middle-East
COMPANY TYPE
Small – Medium Business
INDUSTRY
Retail – Luxury Automobile
CLOUD SOLUTION
While they’re an international company, they have a strong local team in the region, providing a comprehensive portfolio of quality infrastructure and DevOps services. They’re incredibly responsive and quick to address any question or concern, making sound recommendations for increased efficiencies and reduced costs.
THE CUSTOMER
Leveraging decades of experience to support over 200,000 customers, the company is a luxury sales dealership and service specialist for American and European automobile brands in the UAE.
Although the dealership already had a mobile application, it was a replica of their existing website, offering little benefit to customers. The company decided to create a customer-focused app with more features and functionality to simplify and enhance the user experience. The goal was to create a seamless customer journey encompassing all customer activities spanning sales, parts, and service divisions, with integration across all channels.
Built from the customer’s point of view, the app allows users to view existing vehicle ownership and service history, schedule services, and even purchase new vehicles. All a customer has to do is download the app, connect to the dealership via the mobile number on file, and verify their identity to access their data. The app provides various engagement channels—including self-service chatbots, email, phone, and WhatsApp. Integration with Zendesk provides automated trouble ticketing and rapid issue resolution.
THE CHALLENGE
The dealership listed specific business and technical requirements for the new mobile application to ensure they retained customer focus while increasing competitive differentiation. With a focus on agility and flexibility, the dealership wanted a modern architecture enabling them to:
- Accelerate time-to-market through the rapid, incremental delivery of new features and functions
- Minimize the overhead associated with migrating code and uploading workloads
- Optimize the management of compute resources with increased automation
- Reduce the cadence and simplify the application of security updates
While a third-party developer built the mobile app, the dealership turned to their preferred IT partner, Bespin MEA, to provide the required infrastructure and DevOps services. Based on a long and successful partnership, Bespin already managed all of the company’s hosted AWS solutions.
THE SOLUTION
In collaboration with the app developer, Bespin developed an architecture to meet the dealership’s DevOps requirements. While all of the company’s other solutions run on virtual machines hosted on AWS, Bespin designed a modern, pay-per-use AWS architecture using containers and microservices. Bespin’s team provided end-to-end services for the engagement, including root cause analysis, data gathering, solution design, testing, deployment, automation testing, and documentation.
This solution runs three (one public and private) cross-functional micro-services using Docker containers on AWS Fargate with different staging and production areas. Abstracting complex cluster setup and management, AWS Fargate automatically scales as you grow. It eliminates the operational overhead of managing, patching, scaling, and securing servers to achieve fault tolerance, workload isolation, and enhanced security.
To minimize the overhead of operating container repositories and scaling the underlying infrastructure, Bespin used Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR). ECR is a fully-managed Docker container registry, simplifying the storage, management, and deployment of Docker container images. The integration of AWS ECR with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides resource-level control of each repository. Complementing Amazon ECR, Bespin used Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to streamline the development-to-production workflow. Verification of new containers’ health and functionality takes place before draining old container instances, ensuring zero downtime.
Container images are stored in and retrieved from AWS CodeCommit, compiled using AWS CodeBuild, and deployed using AWS CodeDeploy. A fully managed continuous integration service, AWS CodeBuild compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready to deploy software packages. A fully managed deployment service eliminating error-prone manual operations, AWS CodeDeploy automates the deployment of Docker containers to AWS Fargate. Also, each microservice has its own AWS CodePipeline to quickly and reliably automate and orchestrate services’ deployment.
The sub-domain used to serve the application is hosted on Amazon Route 53. Traffic is redirected via AWS CloudFront using custom SSL certificates provisioned using AWS Certificate Manager. Amazon CloudFront, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), and Amazon Route 53 work seamlessly to create a flexible, layered security perimeter. The combination of capabilities protects against multiple types of attacks, including network and application layer DDoS attacks. Co-residing at the AWS edge, these services provide a high-performance, reliable, and scalable security perimeter for the application. The entire AWS environment is monitored via AWS CloudTrail, simplifying operational analysis, and troubleshooting.
RESULTS & BENEFITS
With 2,000 downloads before launching the app through a focused marketing campaign, the dealership has already seen the benefits of the AWS architecture designed, built, and deployed by Bespin. Reducing TCO and improving ROI, the microservices architecture allows them to scale each service up or down independently, reducing AWS costs by up to 50%. And with an integrated continuous delivery and testing process, microservices are easier to debug, test, and maintain, delivering error-free applications for accelerated deployment.
And the partnership with Bespin?
According to the company, one of the key benefits of working with Bespin is their natural ability to take ownership—even when working with third parties. “You just have to mention something to Bespin, and it’s as good as done. It doesn’t matter what it is or who’s involved; you don’t have to worry about it. You know Bespin will look after it. Everything runs smoothly.”
“Bespin is the first number we call for anything IT,” states the Manager of Digital Projects. ”While they’re an international company, they have a strong local team in the region providing, a comprehensive portfolio of quality infrastructure and DevOps services. They’re incredibly responsive and quick to address any question or concern, making sound recommendations to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. Their indepth knowledge and excellent service are the primary reasons they’re our infrastructure partner.”
QUOTES
“You just have to mention something to Bespin, and it’s as good as done. It doesn’t matter what it is or who’s involved; you don’t have to worry about it. You know Bespin will look after it. Everything runs smoothly.”
- Manager of Digital Projects at a luxury automobile dealership in UAE
“Bespin is the first number we call for anything IT. Their indepth knowledge and excellent service are the primary reasons they’re our infrastructure partner.”
- Manager of Digital Projects at a luxury automobile dealership in UAE
“While they’re an international company, they have a strong local team in the region, providing a comprehensive portfolio of quality infrastructure and DevOps services. They’re incredibly responsive and quick to address any question or concern, making sound recommendations for increased efficiencies and reduced costs.”
Manager of Digital Projects at a luxury automobile dealership in UAE
About Bespin Global, an e& enterprise company:
An AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and AWS Managed Service Partner, BESPIN GLOBAL MEA (Middle East and Africa) is a leading provider of automated cloud solutions and consulting services, including cloud adoption, strategy, migration, implementation, Managed Services, DevOps, FinOps and Data & Analytics. Bespin is positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, as well as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for IT Transformation Services.
In late 2022, Bespin Global MEA and e& enterprise formed a joint venture with the aim to assist enterprises in their digital transformation journey and eventually become the largest pure-play public cloud-managed and professional services provider in the Middle East, Turkey, Africa, and Pakistan.
Bespin’s cloud FinOps management platform, OpsNow offers an automated end-to-end solution for customers to effectively manage cloud assets and costs, optimize cloud expenses, and automate the implementation of cloud governance policies across multi-cloud environments.
Email: info@bespinglobal.ae
Address: The Offices 4, #138-139, One Central, Dubai World Trade Center (DWTC)
Telephone: 800 BESPIN (237746)
P.O. Box: 340729
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