25sprout Turns Customer Feedback into Valuable Insights with AWS
2021
25sprout maximizes the performance of its SurveyCake software as a service online survey on AWS. SurveyCake enables businesses to create highly flexible online surveys to gather customers’ impressions. Survey data is stored in Amazon Aurora, with application container clusters managed by Amazon ECS and the underlying infrastructure scaled automatically using Amazon Fargate.
With AWS, we can handle any amount of data and help our clients gain higher revenues and happier customers at a low cost.”
Alex Liu
Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer, 25sprout
Building Surveys: A Piece of Cake
Customer surveys deliver unfiltered impressions that are an integral part of improving any product or service. And with online customer surveys, companies can gain insights at a lower cost in a format that’s easier to process for quick analysis.
Taiwan-based startup
25sprout wanted to provide a seamless way for businesses to obtain their customers’ feedback digitally, either via a QR code or URL. In 2012, the startup developed
SurveyCake, an enterprise-level software as a service (SaaS) solution that takes online surveys to a new level.
Alex Liu, cofounder and chief executive officer at 25sprout, says, “We wanted to make completing and analyzing surveys a piece of cake. Our promise is to help our clients go beyond just collecting survey data. We help them take the next step and make decisions based on the findings.” Global enterprises in the finance, automotive, and sportswear industries use SurveyCake in addition to Taiwanese government ministries and small businesses.
A Scalable, Secure Survey Tool on the Cloud
To meet the needs of its B2B customers, 25sprout focused on the infrastructure performance behind SurveyCake. Online surveys can take place after office hours, so the solution’s infrastructure had to be reliable 24x7 and highly scalable. The startup decided to run SurveyCake on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, and according to Liu, it was an easy decision to make. “We can have thousands of people filling out online surveys at the same time, and AWS offered the flexibility and stability we require,” says Liu.
Furthermore, the overall security of the AWS infrastructure met SurveyCake’s customers’ requirements, particularly in the financial services industry. Liu comments, “There are many free online survey tools in the market, but they might not be as secure. Businesses choose SurveyCake because they know their customers’ data is safe on AWS.”
Automation, Customization, and Integration
Banks in Taiwan, for instance, are using SurveyCake to obtain customer feedback on their banking experience and satisfaction level. “When customers leave the bank, they get an automated SMS [short message service] through SurveyCake asking them to rate their experience,” says Liu.
To encourage survey participation, customers receive rewards or incentives after completing a survey, such as coffee coupons, which SurveyCake sends out via SMS or a URL. Additionally, banks can connect SurveyCake to their customer relationship management systems through application programming interfaces (APIs) for a more complete analysis of their customers. “With AWS, we can offer a level of automation, customization, and integration that really sets us apart from our competition,” comments Liu.
Lowers Database Cost by 30%
As the startup expanded and onboarded new clients, the volume of survey data it was storing grew rapidly. When volumes increased beyond 4 TB, 25sprout decided to migrate from
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL to
Amazon Aurora. Thundersha Kuo, cofounder and chief technology officer at 25sprout, says, “With Amazon Aurora, we’re no longer constrained by data storage limits, and we can grow our business without hesitation. Plus, Amazon Aurora automatically replicates copies of our data to
Amazon Simple Storage Service [Amazon S3] across three
AWS Availability Zones, so we don’t have to worry about backups.”
25sprout is also using
Amazon ElastiCache, a fully managed in-memory data store and cache service, to offload workloads from Amazon Aurora. “We reduced the costs of our database by 30 percent by using Amazon ElastiCache. What’s great about AWS is that we’re constantly introduced to new solutions that we can leverage as we continue to scale,” says Kuo.
Handles More than 20,000 Concurrent Responses
In addition to scaling its database, SurveyCake had to be equipped to handle traffic peaks. For example, one of SurveyCake’s clients, a large mobile gaming provider, launched a survey to millions of its subscribers via a push notification on its application. Due to high customer participation, the infrastructure had to cope with more than 20,000 concurrent responses and feedback from over 500,000 customers.
“We had to think about the volume of server requests and data we were receiving and how long it takes to tabulate customers’ responses on our backend to show real-time insights. With the help of AWS, we fine-tuned our infrastructure to cope with that challenge and today, we can manage more than 20,000 concurrent responses,” says Liu.
Reduces Compute Costs by 40%
One of 25sprout’s fine-tuning initiatives was moving to a microservices infrastructure, which enabled the business to easily scale its platform and improve its DevOps efficiency. The startup is using
AWS Fargate with
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to eliminate provisioning, configuring, and scaling clusters, which in turn has reduced the time to manage container images by around 70 percent.
When data pours in after a new survey launches, AWS Fargate scales the compute to closely match the specified resource requirements. “With AWS Fargate, we don’t have to overprovision our resources and pay for additional servers. As a result, we’ve reduced our compute costs by 40 percent per survey,” says Kuo.
Collecting Feedback for the Greater Good
Ultimately, SurveyCake is helping its clients go beyond collecting survey data. In 2020, the startup enabled government agencies in Taiwan to set up a visitor registration form in less than a week and collected information from thousands of citizens within minutes. It also assisted in developing a vaccine registration system that allows citizens to choose their preferred vaccine appointment slot. Once the slots are full, the system automatically switches off. “Initially, Taiwan did not have a central registration system, so we stepped in to assist many local governments who used our tool to fulfill their urgent requirements. Given the high demand for vaccines, we experienced a lot of traffic, but we managed this easily,” says Liu.
Liu concludes, “With AWS, we can handle any amount of data and help our clients gain higher revenues and happier customers at a low cost.”
To learn more, visit
aws.amazon.com/advertising-marketing.
About 25sprout
Startup 25sprout provides the latest UX/UI design and development, internet technology, and cloud applications to its clients which include Fortune 500 companies. 25sprout’s main product is SurveyCake, an enterprise-level cloud survey service focused on interpreting survey responses and converting data into meaningful insights.
Benefits of AWS
- Reduces database costs by 30%
- Handles over 20,000 concurrent survey responses
- Cuts compute costs by 40%
- Decreases the time to manage container images by 70%
- Enables data collection from thousands of citizens within minutes
AWS Services Used
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon ElastiCache allows you to seamlessly set up, run, and scale popular open-source compatible in-memory data stores in the cloud. Build data-intensive apps or boost the performance of your existing databases by retrieving data from high throughput and low latency in-memory data stores.
Amazon Elastic Compute Service
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that helps you easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.
AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers. AWS Fargate is compatible with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
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