How Sky Mobile increased conversions & sped up sales on iPhone launch day

Sky is one of Europe’s leading media and entertainment companies, connecting millions of customers across six countries to the best in sports, news, and entertainment. In 2016, Sky launched Sky Mobile, their telecommunications subsidiary with a fresh take on the UK telco customer experience.

From the beginning, Sky Mobile differentiated itself by focusing on what consumers wanted from a mobile service provider. Their straightforward pricing, rollover data plans, and the ability to change contracts at any time saw Sky Mobile quickly become the UK’s fastest growing mobile network.

But in the world of telcos, there’s one day that offers more sales opportunities, more challenges, and more traffic than any other: iPhone launch day.

For Sky Mobile, the annual launch of the new iPhone is a crucial opportunity to bring in new customers, upgrade existing customers, and hit device sales targets. But the sudden spikes in traffic the launch attracts also brings major challenges, straining Sky’s infrastructure and threatening their ability to deliver a top-tier customer experience.

We sat down with Sky’s Mobile Technology and Digital Services team to find out how they took control of their iPhone launch experience with Queue-it, and to learn how the waiting room helped them speed up sales, boost conversions, and deliver a seamless customer experience.

“The iPhone launch day is our biggest trading day of the year,” says Tom Grammer, Head of Mobile Service. “We sell a day’s worth of iPhones in an hour.”

“The launch attracts an incredible amount of traffic in a very short period. Our systems are built for general trading, not high velocity-type sales,” adds Kevin Lau, Service Manager. “It’s caused issues almost every year.”

In the competitive telco and device sales market, Grammer explains, businesses can’t afford to have website problems on iPhone launch day. “The new iPhone is available from many places, so we need to put our best foot forward and give every customer the experience they know and expect from Sky.”

While selling a product like an iPhone might sound straightforward, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to get things right.

“We have multiple makes, models, and colors, along with different package and plan options,” Grammer says. “We offer bundle packages and pricing options tailored to customers with TV, broadband, and mobile accounts stretching back many years. We run credit checks and fraud checks on all customers and transactions. There are so many interactions going on between the customer and CRM systems to build their basket. And when you multiply that by thousands of customers per minute, things get really difficult.”

“We’ve run a lot of performance tests, we’ve optimized our systems, we even scale up cloud instances by 4x for the launch,” says Lau. “But there are always bottlenecks—the sales platforms are just not made to handle that level of demand.”

“It would take a huge amount of time and money to scale our backend systems to where we need it for these iPhone launches—and that’s just not a reasonable investment for a single hour of peak traffic every year,” says Grammer. “It works exactly as it should for everyday, business-as-usual traffic, so we wouldn’t get any return-on-investment for buying more hardware, CPU, or cloud or application storage.”

“Ahead of our 2023 iPhone launch, we knew we needed something to control the traffic,” says Grammer. “So we implemented a waiting room solution that was like Queue-it but was more limited in its features and capabilities.”

While this alternative waiting room solution kept Sky’s site online for the 2023 launch, it had several shortcomings that drove the team to switch to Queue-it for the 2024 iPhone 16 launch.

The issues with the previous waiting room service were fourfold, explained Grammer, Lau, and Chris Price, Sky's Digital Support Lead:

• Limited analytics and control: “We couldn’t see how many people were in the queue or finely control how many were sent to our site, which meant we had to keep the waiting room up longer than needed. And the limited observability meant we had to rely on application logs and data that weren’t real-time, so by the time we identified issues, it was too late.”
  
  
• No first-come, first-served mechanism: “The solution wasn’t first-in-first-out, which meant people could get access before someone who had waited longer than them. We don’t receive all the iPhones at once and we send them out according to when the orders are placed, so the system wasn’t fair for our customers.”
  
  
• Limited customization and wait information: “There were limited options for customization and we couldn’t show customers their progress or estimated wait time, which meant we couldn’t engage customers or keep them up-to-date during the event.”
  
  
• Complex implementation and operation: “There was a lot more manual configuration involved, both with implementation and with adjusting the traffic flow—it wasn’t fit for purpose. Everything took time and effort to change, which limited our ability to act fast and react to the unexpected.”

“Overall, it just felt like a bit of a white-knuckle ride,” Grammer explains. “We couldn’t inform the business teams what was happening, we weren’t satisfied with the customer experience, and we didn’t have the observability to feel confident during the event.”

“There were too many unknowns that made us nervous,” adds Price. “We didn’t want to put ourselves or our customers through that again, which is why we started working with Queue-it.”

Sky ran their 2024 iPhone launch using Queue-it’s virtual waiting room to control the traffic. In an internal post-sale analysis of their first launch with Queue-it, the team found that:

• Queue-it’s virtual waiting room supported significant sales benefit and customer experience improvements vs. the 2023 launch
• Sky sold more iPhones YoY despite smaller relative industry demand
• Sky improved their YoY conversion rate by 37%
• Sky reduced the time the waiting room was active for by 66%

How did Sky and Queue-it achieve these outcomes?

On the day of the iPhone launch, the Sky Mobile team set up Queue-it’s virtual waiting room in scheduled event mode, protecting their site against early traffic spikes by collecting visitors on the pre-queue holding page.

When the sale went live at 1 p.m., all visitors waiting in the pre-queue were randomized and flowed to Sky Mobile’s waiting room, ensuring all visitors who arrived on time got an equal shot at first position in queue. Visitors who arrived late were placed into the waiting room in first-come-first-served order, for fairness.

The team monitored the sales progress with the GO Queue-it Platform, tweaking traffic flow in real-time based on incoming traffic data and how their systems were performing.

“The insights Queue-it provides into traffic and the level of control it gave us made a dramatic difference,” says Lau. “Using the Queue-it dashboard, we could maximize the event far more effectively, running the waiting room for just over an hour, compared to three hours in 2023. We could see the number of people waiting, how many people were being sent through, and adjust all that on-the-fly, which helped a lot.”

“The observability and flexibility of Queue-it really gave us confidence for the event.”

Chris Price, Digital Support Lead

“The prime example of observability came when we saw a spike in traffic from TikTok entering the queue without checking out,” says Price. “With our previous tool, we wouldn’t have even noticed this, let alone been able do something about it. But with Queue-it, we spotted the issue and quickly added a configuration in the GO Queue-it Platform for the waiting room to effectively ignore TikTok bots. We immediately saw wait time drop and were able to switch the waiting room to only be visible at peak.”

“The biggest difference for me was the customer experience that we offered,” Grammer says. “We fully customized the waiting room to match our branding, provide key info, and give indicative pricing to visitors. We made sure customers got access in fair order and gave them detailed wait time information. I think these factors really kept people engaged and helped us increase our conversion rate.”

"If you have peak demand scenarios like an iPhone launch, Queue-it is really a no brainer. It’s an easy win for successfully handling big events without investing huge amounts of money into re-architecting for peak traffic.”

Tom Grammer, Head of Mobile Services

Alongside the improved customer experience and sales figures, the end-to-end experience with Queue-it, the Sky team say, made a dramatic difference to the team’s confidence, collaboration, and workload.

Sky used Queue-it’s Akamai EdgeWorkers Connector, which streamlined the integration process and boosted site performance.

“Integrating with Akamai EdgeWorkers made the whole process a lot simpler and more secure,” says Lau. “Configuration was fast and running logic on the edge ensured our origin servers were free to focus on dynamic calls and transactions.”

“Queue-it’s support team went above and beyond what we expected. We had weekly meetings in the lead up to the launch to run tests, optimize the setup, and go through game day scenarios. They were very engaged and proactive with answering technical questions and proposing solutions, which gave us a lot of confidence.”

Kevin Lau, Service Manager

The ability to customize the waiting room and control the user experience, Grammer says, also helped foster stronger cross-team collaboration and buy-in before the event.

“Using Queue-it enabled us to collaborate far more than we’d done previously with other teams. The other solutions we’d tried—optimizing our systems and the previous virtual waiting room service—were mostly limited to the tech teams. But the customization options with Queue-it meant we could involve the business teams in game days to brainstorm and design the customer experience. It meant they were far more engaged and comfortable with what was happening.”

After the success of their first iPhone launch with Queue-it, Lau, Grammer, and Price are already looking for new ways to leverage the waiting room to protect their services and uphold the customer experience.

“We’ve set Queue-it up as a safety net for Black Friday,” says Lau. “We don’t expect to need it, but it’s nice to know it’s there if anything unexpected occurs. Then we also see a big spike in SIM activations on Christmas day, so we’ll set up a waiting room there to protect that process.”

“We’re also looking to use Queue-it for planned maintenance,” says Price. “After the iPhone launch, we quickly realized the waiting room was a much better communication tool than a basic, static page. So we’re planning to use it to give customers more accurate, up-to-date information when our site is down for maintenance.”

“It’s been one of the nice things about Queue-it now that we have it set up—we’re actively finding new areas where it can give us that extra bit of security and peace of mind,” Grammer adds. “Now when these sorts of peak moments come up we know exactly how to handle them, which gives us confidence going forward.”