The St. Gallen Symposium is a global gathering of senior business leaders, politicians, NGO representatives and renowned pundits that takes place annually at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Its legacy online platform could not meet the demands and expectations of the symposium’s distinguished participants.

Heavy traffic during peak registration times pressured the website and risked crashes. Manual processes for hotel bookings, transportation, scheduling and customer tracking were prone to human error, and the lack of a standardised system of management meant a disconnected experience for all.

Symposium organisers knew a change was in order. They envisioned a registration website that would be as progressive as their debates.

The St. Gallen Symposium wanted a partner that understands the technology needed to deliver the best digital services to all users, so they turned to Accenture and Avanade for their core expertise on the Sitecore platform. We built a standard web application hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform, which provides a feasible solution for user registration. The application, known as My Symposium, is designed to support and track session registration and attendance authorisation. Given the global extent of the event, we helped St. Gallen Symposium set up the cloud infrastructure in Azure so users can access the same standard of services from any location.

Today, the St. Gallen Symposium operates on the new Sitecore platform and the capabilities achieved offer significant benefits for ensuing events:

• Increased scale, speed and reliability: By leveraging Azure cloud infrastructure, the symposium can now easily process nearly 1,000 registrations during a two-day period.
• Improved efficiency at reduced costs: Automated and digitized processes managed in a new centralised CMR system are easy to use and eliminate manual errors.
• Expanded features: The Sitecore platform expanded the built-in features available to registering participants – including hotel bookings, transportation services, information updates and session registration.
• Optimised user experience: Along with the SpotMe app, the site offers a more reliable registration process and easy for users to access on the go.