The Diagon Alley is the center of wizarding London, offering an assortment of restaurants, shops, and other services that are necessary for all magic people. To make sure this alley and everything in it is hidden from the muggle world, there have been taken steps to make it easier to hide. The streets are narrow, the buildings are small and the stores often have very few employees.

This means that there is usually very crowded in the alley and, particularly before the start of a new school year at Hogwarts, the stores are full of wizards and witches of every age. As a result, the shopping experience is not very comfortable as the lines are long, the stores are crowded and the staff is overworked.

This is where we come in. We want to help this magical world by improving the customer experience, increase the efficiency of the local businesses, expand the local economy and reducing unnecessary waste.

Improving the customer experience…

We want to create a solution that personalize and assist them in finding the equipment they need with less time spent waiting in lines. As a way of doing this we plan to create a “magic” mirror they can use while shopping that connects to their online profile and gives a visualization of their shopping list, personal information and other useful data.

… And moving the store lines to the cloud

As a way to improve the efficiency of the local businesses, we want to create a solution that reduces the time customers spend in the store. By creating a personalized profile for customers and give them the possibility of  ordering their equipment ahead of their visit, the customer service will be faster and allow the workers to focus on other tasks. This will also give valuable data the businesses can use to improve their income by adding modules for marketing or following up customers.

Digitalizing the magic

The target group for our business model is the local businesses of Diagon Alley, and the main product is a solution for customer relationship and marketing built using Dynamics and the Power Platform. This also makes Dataverse a natural choice as a database due to the built-in connections and easy setup, and easily synchronize data between users and businesses.

To improve the business value, there will be possible for the businesses to expand the solution by adding modules for additional customer interaction and marketing functionality. In addition, it will be possible to buy a smart mirror that allows customer to directly interact with their personal profile. This mirror is driven by a Raspberry Pi that recognizes the customer by using Azure AI Services, retrieves the customers data and displays it within the mirror.