Virtual waiting rooms take the strain out of online queuing and shopping

When CrowdHandler wanted to expand its market-leading virtual waiting room service, it turned to Akamai to help it reach a global audience that includes some of the biggest names in e-commerce, events, fashion, and digital art. Thanks to Edgeworkers, part of Akamai Cloud Computing, these clients can now set up a virtual waiting room in a matter of hours, delivering a fair and transparent service to customers eager to attend the hottest gigs, wear the latest gear, or show-off eye-catching artwork. 

No more worries when waiting in line

If you've ever set an alarm to buy tickets for a chart-topping band or an exclusive line of sneakers or trainers when they drop online, you’ll know how nerve wracking it can be. You can spend hours constantly refreshing the web page, only to get a message that the event or the shoes have sold out.

It's also a major issue for event organizers and retailers. Even the biggest e-commerce and event websites can be challenged with a sudden spike in traffic involving thousands of visitors or more. Aside from losing revenue if the website crashes, they also suffer reputational damage if customers share their frustration on social media.

These are the challenges that Jake Grimley wanted to overcome when he founded CrowdHandler, a technology innovator that enables organizations to set up virtual waiting rooms in front of their main website. Instead of constantly hitting refresh, customers now see their position in a virtual queue, while a progress bar shows how long they can expect to wait.

Grimley founded the business in 2020, at a time when the live event industry was struggling through the Covid-19 pandemic. He identified many businesses that were struggling to handle the huge spikes in online traffic, including e-retail, digital artworks, and even vaccination appointments.

Grimley says, “In some cases, these clients come to us right in the middle of a crisis, so speed to deployment is everything. We wanted CrowdHandler to be a self-service solution that can be up and running in a matter of hours.”

Preventing people from jumping the queue

With a background in IT services and consulting, Grimley already knew Akamai for its world leading CDN and security solutions. When Akamai launched EdgeWorkers in 2021, he immediately saw how it could benefit CrowdHandler and its clients. “EdgeWorkers enables our development teams to deploy virtual waiting rooms ‘on the edge’, as close as possible to end users,” he says. “This helps prevent tech savvy users from jumping the queue, making the experience fairer for everyone.”

Any organization already using Akamai’s CDN network of a quarter of a million servers can potentially install CrowdHandler in less than a few hours. “We make sure that the CrowdHandler waiting room does not compromise or disrupt Akamai's ability to cache pages in any way,” says Grimley. “You can keep informational pages up and running, while taking advantage of the waiting room to queue access to heavier transactional pages.”

Another advantage of integrating the service with Akamai EdgeWorkers is that CrowdHandler becomes a completely white labeled service. It lives on the client’s domain, so users remain on their site, rather than being redirected to a subdomain or entirely different domain. “The service works directly from Akamai's CDN network so there is no need for our clients to make any changes to their application code or web servers,” says Grimley.

Clients can adapt the virtual waiting room to the specific needs of their products and audience. For example, bands can send VIP fans a passcode that puts them in a priority lane in the waiting room. They can also indicate waiting room capacity and stock availability levels so that customers don’t waste their time waiting for an item that’s already sold out. 

Light touch integration keeps pages loading fast

Brands can now manage sales and protect their reputation by offering a fairer waiting room experience. Take the example of a retailer announcing a limited line of sneakers that go on sale at 9am in two days’ time. The retailer can set up a countdown clock in advance and when the sale goes live, the software randomizes the position of anyone already in the waiting room. People who join afterwards are added to the back of the line. 

“We look very carefully at social media activity around ticket sales and product drops,” says Grimley. “When companies deploy CrowdHandler, fans and shoppers are much more satisfied, and many point out the advantages of a system where you know roughly how long you have to wait rather than pressing refresh non-stop.”

He also points out the speed and quality of Akamai’s EdgeWorkers network. “Because the CrowdHandler waiting room configuration and user status is maintained within Akamai, our EdgeWorkers code adds an average of just 20 milliseconds to page load times.” By using this ‘light touch’ integration, rather than making multiple API calls, CrowdHandler maintains a smooth customer experience with no noticeable slowdown in page loading times.

Proactive assistance from an enthusiastic support team

Grimley was also impressed by the enthusiastic support provided by Akamai. “Akamai is one of the most engaged vendors we've ever worked with. They didn't just offer their technical expertise; they’ve promoted our service on their social channels as well.” He also appreciates the proactive advice that he gets from the Akamai team. “If we ask for help or come at things from a slightly different angle, Akamai has always embraced the challenge and assisted us. It’s been very refreshing.”

Looking ahead, he sees the future potential of Akamai EdgeKV, which stores unstructured or semi-structured data in the EdgeWorkers environment. “EdgeKV, alongside Akamai’s acquisition of Linode, offers the opportunity to develop within Akamai’s environment bringing further efficiencies in throughput, latency, and scalability.” 

CrowdHandler’s CTO, Luke Owen, stresses the overall engagement, support, and experience that Akamai brings to the partnership. This includes the ongoing refinement of the virtual waiting room technology and the addition of new features. “When we change things on the platform, we’ll get a reminder to test it on our staging site before full deployment. It’s details like these that give us the confidence that Akamai has our backs, which is great news for our clients and their customers.”