Musiikkitalo, a concert and event venue in Helsinki, Finland, uses SharinPix on top of Salesforce to manage images that fuel their customer experience systems online and on physical screens within their building. Since adopting SharinPix, the team behind Musiikkitalo has benefited from easy upload, automatic cropping, and external distribution of images in a way that’s easy to teach to new team members and external users.
Since its first opening to the public in 2011, the Helsinki Music Centre, or Musiikkitalo in Finnish, has hosted thousands of events and shone as the center of the Helsinki cultural scene. Featuring more than just music, Musiikkitalo is an excellent place for Helsinki's people and visitors to appreciate its art, architecture, and history.
As an event venue mainly focused on classical music, it features a concert hall designed by Yasuhisa Toyota that holds 1700 people and hosts orchestras, as well as the world's largest modern concert hall organ. Musiikkitalo also contains five smaller concert halls, among other spaces, and holds around 2000 events annually, with over 300 being ticketed events. The music center also hosts three resident organizations, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the University of Arts Sibelius Academy.
As a venue management company, they rent out spaces in their venue and provide production services, ticketing services, marketing services, and more to ensure the success of all the different events held there.
Musiikkitalo and Salesforce:
Musiikkitalo started using Salesforce in 2011, slowly ramping up its usage until 2017, when it started to take advantage of the technology's full potential. Since then, they have used Salesforce as a production management tool or an “everything management system” for customer-facing and internal processes. When they say everything, they mean use cases that range from finance and building management systems like air conditioning to customer experience management.
Visiting the events calendar on their website will show you one of the primary uses of Salesforce as a customer-facing application. By storing all the event information in Salesforce, they can distribute it to the public in many ways, including via this website.
The Musiikkitalo Challenge:
The team at Musiikkitalo wanted to improve the usage of images in the customer-facing areas of their Salesforce implementation. No website is complete without images, and managing the photos accompanying up to 2000 yearly events, coming from internal and external sources, on a website is a tall order.
This need led Musiikkitalo to search for a way to add an image management system to Salesforce, where the rest of the production data was already stored.
The SharinPix Solution:
As the master data for their event calendar lives in Salesforce, it made sense for the Musiikkitalo team to find a way to integrate photos directly into those existing workflows.
SharinPix became the way that Musiikkitalo could add images to all of their event records in Salesforce, upload them easily, and then conduct actions like cropping and tagging without leaving Salesforce. The music center’s connection to WordPress then takes the SharinPix images, held as URLs, from Salesforce and displays them on their website in the appropriate location and format.
How does this look in Salesforce? Each record in their custom "Production" object hosts the information for each performance. The Lightning record page includes a tab called "Images," where the SharinPix Album component lives, allowing users to easily upload, view, and tag images.
They also add a standard 16:9 ratio cropping transformation to each photo to ensure that images always display perfectly on their website.
Experience Cloud
The resident organizations at Musiikkitalo also needed the ability to edit and publish their events from the Salesforce platform. To solve this, Musiikkitalo built out an Experience Cloud platform that also integrates SharinPix, making it easier for the residents’ marketing teams to upload images without worrying about size or file limitations and cropping them easily within Salesforce.
Digital Signage at Musiikkitalo
In addition to using images on the website, Musiikkitalo also feeds images to around 40 different digital screens that rotate promotional information for upcoming events. The images cycled through the screens are stored in Salesforce via SharinPix and ported to the screens via a custom webpage.
The Results
With SharinPix, Musiikkitalo can have a single view for all its image-based use cases. It’s a three-minute job to show someone how to use it, even if they’ve never used Salesforce. Having the images accessible in different sizes, qualities, and formats has allowed them to explore new ways to promote events and enhance the customer experience at the venue.
The Musiikkitalo team is happy that they can outsource the production and, therefore, image management to their residents via their experience cloud platform, saving them time internally. With a lean marketing team, Salesforce Experience Cloud, and SharinPix save them from manually managing thousands of images for their events every year.
Use Images to Transform Your Customer Experiences Like Musiikkitalo
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