The Open – ‘Best Business Impact’

Awarding performance: The Open – ‘Best Business Impact’ Award Sitecore Symposium 2019

This year’s Sitecore Symposium, one of the leading digital marketing events of the year, honored one of our most prestigious clients, The Open, with the “Best Business Impact” award. The Sitecore Symposium brought together, in this years’ edition, hundreds of digital experts, marketers, developers, partners and customers, in order to be inspired, share knowledge and gain insights when it comes to using Sitecore.
This year’s theme was all about human connections in a digital world.

The Open Championship is the oldest golf tournament in the world, and one of the most prestigious. This complex, intriguing and very challenging project was handled and delivered in a joint effort, powered by TEC: Digital Agency, Delete Agency and R&A. The project was represented on stage by Karen Lyttle, R&A’s UX & Design Manager. With a background in Service Design and UX, she has worked on the improving the overall digital customer experience, developing the strategic direction and project managing front-end development for all digital channels across The Open and The R&A.

The R&A have recently defined and implemented a digital transformation strategy for The Open in order to re-engage existing fans and capture new ones. They did that by introducing a new website that integrates every aspect of The Open, from qualification and ticket sales to the live event itself, into a single connected experience.

Karen’s presentation was focused on the Digital transformation in Golf. During her keynote, she shared with the audience some experiences and learnings about the process of a digital transformation in this business.
After the first release of tickets and its massive success, was necessary to set up a waiting list, because of the number of customers that wanted to be added to a list. This wasn’t something anticipated, it was a bit of a quick turn around. This new improvement not only let them grow their data, but it also ensured that they had more happy customers.
For an incredible ticketing journey, a big part of the process was the caching strategy, adding more servers and do the performance testing for the ticketing platform. The Open was preparing for over 2000 purchases per minute so they had to rely on a robust platform. The launch of tickets for The 149th Open Championship went very smoothly thanks to the fact that every single step has been planned down to the last minute.

This project wouldn’t have been a success without the dedication and support from all partners involved.

The Open – One project, one digital transformation.
4,000 man-days put into this project, 33 people from different agency teams in 7 countries.

Teodora Leonte COMMUNICATIONS & PR MANAGER