Web portal for online music school

Company Overview

Music school, specializing in singing lessons, provides offline and online services. Through our boutique studios, in-home music lessons, and robust online vocal program, we’re committed to making effective, high-quality voice lessons accessible and affordable to everyone, everywhere, while teaching you the styles and techniques you want to learn.

Challenge

Before the cooperation between our companies, The Inside Voice used another web service for managing the connection between teachers and students. But, they wanted to elevate the quality of services. Therefore, they wanted to build a scalable platform to fit their needs.

The task included the creation of an easy-to-use schedule and matching system to help students find proper teachers. In addition, all this system needed to be connected to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales module to help with leads tracking.

Approach

In partnership with The Inside Voice, we developed a business case that presents the solutions, timelines, costs, and long-term benefits of the proposed project. In addition, a detailed plan for implementing and adopting the new project was developed to understand the needs of end users within the company thoroughly. This information was used to determine the project's deployment, roll-out, and training requirements.

As the project needed a web interface, we needed to decide which technology we will use for the backend and frontend. Besides this, we had to plan integration with payment service, marketing notification tool and analytics.

This is an agile project, and we chose to implement it via continuous delivery and manage the whole project in Microsoft DevOps. So, all updates on the platform go through all necessary steps and are covered with tests.

Solutions

• Portal core was hosted on Microsoft Azure, including Azure Active Directory B2C. The database was deployed using Azure SQL.

• Frontend of the portal was developed using .NET Angular framework. That includes the website, portal interface, and admin panel.

• One of the core parts of the portal was a planner where students and teachers could schedule lessons. Users can have two time zones simultaneously, which helps to schedule lessons worldwide.

• Flexible filters for students to select the exact teacher at the exact time and day they need.

• For business administrators, we created an additional promo section where they can develop codes for specific days, times and lessons so they could attract more students for hours they are less busy

• We integrated the possibility of uploading videos to the portal that allowed prerecorded lessons. On the other hand, students can record videos with their performance and get review-style lessons from their teachers.

• In addition to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, we’ve integrated the Marketing module. It allowed The Inside Voice to create forms and customer journeys with email notifications. For SMS notifications, we’ve integrated the Twilio service

• The payments side was covered by Authorize.net and was integrated into the system

• Microsoft Clarity was connected to the website to collect more data about website usage. Using heatmaps and usage records, we update the interface all the time.

Outcomes

• The number of students increased due to the intuitive interface and flexible scheduler.

• Teachers can cover all time with lessons using discounts for a specific time.

• School admins can track each teacher's performance from the platform and adjust what they need.

• The platform is scalable and can be offered as SaaS to other companies.

• The system is integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and allows the tracking of all leads in one place.

• Whole project is cloud-based