One of the leading co-creation agencies hires Iflexion to develop a collaborative platform to bring brand owners closer to their target audiences.
Our Customer, C Space (formerly known as Promise Corporation) is a reputed customer collaboration consulting agency and a pioneer in the field of co-creation. Since 2000, the company has been helping world-known brands build trustful relationships with customers and improve their offerings via client-centric co-innovation.
The Customer was looking for a partner experienced in .NET development to design and implement a custom collaboration solution. The solution was to enable dialog streams between brands and their audiences, thus uncovering valuable insights about preferences and expectation of the target audiences. The Customer chose Iflexion as a trusted service provider with an extensive expertise in delivering custom .NET-based solutions and in collaboration software development.
Iflexion’s business analysts gathered the Customer’s requirements onsite. This allowed them to understand the project outline clearly and to create a detailed project plan with comprehensive feature maps.
The preliminary analysis enabled Iflexion’s team to split the project into 10 phases. Following the Agile methodology, the team deployed the solution in stages and improved its functionality continuously according to the Customer’s feedback.
Iflexion created a scalable online platform that supports private online communities. The communities enable thousands of employees, customers, stakeholders, and experts to collaborate simultaneously, exchange opinions and share their ideas about products and services. This way, the platform acts as a brand's personal 24/7 consumer advisory board that allows contacting the relevant audience on a permanent basis. Thanks to the ongoing collaboration, brands can decide on optimal improvements faster and implement changes that customers expect.
The final solution contains a number of custom features that enable diversified and dynamic collaboration of various participants.
Involved in the collaboration software development project, Iflexion used ASP.NET as the main technology framework and leveraged the Microsoft Entity Framework with customized third-party components as the data access layer.
Considering the performance requirements and complexity of the required user interface, Iflexion team offered to use a Microsoft SQL Server in order to ensure a correct representation of media files.
The team implemented a set of native ISAPI extensions and filters in order to support multiple communities hosted on a single website with a minimal performance penalty, ensure in-memory caching of media files, and tune HTTP caching.
In less than one year, the Customer launched six communities with several thousands of active users for clients from UK, USA, and UAE. The Customer invited Iflexion to manage two more development phases with a total duration of one year and enrich the solution with the new functionality. New phases will bring multilingual support, additional collaboration methods, and analytical capabilities.