THE GULU - Queuing & Appointment Services

About the app

Given the fast-paced nature of life in Hong Kong, THE GULU provides a range of services such as Queuing, Appointment scheduling, Takeaway, Shopping, and Promotional Offers. Our varied offerings encompass an extensive list of dining options including all-you-can-eat Japanese buffets, hotpot venues, traditional Chinese dining, and Western restaurants. We are now expanding our services to include queuing and appointment systems for educational institutions, hair salons, beauty treatment facilities, and medical consultations. Whether you need to book a doctor's visit, participate in a parent-teacher conference, arrange for a haircut, or enjoy a facial treatment, THE GULU guarantees a hassle-free experience with pre-scheduled appointments and queuing.

THE GULU - Conserve your time and make the most of it!

Main features:

Queuing - Obtain a remote queuing ticket with real-time updates on waiting status through the app, along with push notifications reminding you when your seat is approaching.

Appointment - Schedule appointments anytime and from anywhere. Pay deposits directly via the app.

Takeaway - Place orders in advance and collect them at the store.

Shopping - Discover attractive deals while shopping online.

Promo Offer - Download discount coupons and use them in-store.

Review - Share your voice comments with the community.

Customer Introduction

THE GULU is an application that focuses on queue management automation as well as a platform that customizes crowd management.

THE GULU provides remote queuing systems for the catering industry to enhance the dining experience, reduce customer churn, and enable merchants to better organize waiting customers during peak hours. It provides authentic backend data to help merchants make informed strategic adjustments.

In addition to the local catering industry in Hong Kong (China), THE GULU also provides crowd management services to government organizations and large companies that hold major events, such as the Hong Kong Tourism Board and the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, letting them to create a safe and secure environment for Hong Kong citizens.

Challenges & Goals

As a queue management platform, THE GULU is always facing an unpredictable number of customers. The customization of queue management solutions makes it more sensitive to the issue, as its servers need to be more adaptive to seasonal peak shifts where large volumes of data are generated by loads of ticket pickups within a short period of time.

With secure, stable, and highly scalable data services, Tencent Cloud can provide solid technical support for THE GULU, helping it deliver more powerful and supportive services.

Why Tencent Cloud

Tencent Cloud offers comprehensive and stable cloud services to meet different requirements of THE GULU.

In particular, THE GULU faces great traffic fluctuations in queuing and reservation services, with 20 times more traffic during peak hours than usual. Therefore, it is crucial to be flexible in server capacity expansion. As early as 2019 and 2020, THE GULU fully migrated its application to Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE) to tackle rapid business changes with elastically and horizontally scalable services.

THE GULU has also migrated its database to TencentDB for Redis, so that it can flexibly add read-only databases and update the primary database within seconds. Additionally, it leverages Redis clusters and accelerated data access to easily handle over one million transactions per hour.

Besides remote queuing, THE GULU also utilizes big data, AI, and machine learning to help users save time and reduce gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, more and more people order meals on phones, but it may take quite some time for merchants to enter the information of their offerings. In response, THE GULU adopts Tencent Cloud OCR service in addition to voice input, which can convert menu pictures into text to allow for easy input.

The beginning days of 2022 witnessed long queues in COVID-19 testing centers and sampling stations in multiple districts of Hong Kong, and the cold rain only added to the problem. THE GULU responded swiftly and contacted major contractors to set up queuing kiosks at many testing centers.

With the aid of Tencent Cloud, THE GULU made it possible for people to take a number and check how many people were ahead of them in real time on their phones, saving them the time in queuing on site and reducing gatherings.

Highlighted Benefits

THE GULU is always trying out new services and features, so it needs highly adaptive cloud services to keep pace with its growth. In addition to stable cloud services, Tencent Cloud also boasts efficient and premium customer service that assists THE GULU in mastering new technologies quickly.

THE GULU will continue using Tencent Cloud services and pay special attention to how to use innovative technologies and applications to optimize the processes and experience for merchants and users. Looking ahead, we at THE GULU are confident that we will keep collaborating with Tencent Cloud on our way to global expansion.