Thread by @SwitchByDispace

🥇How we built the most comprehensive events and meetings management solution in the market.

A product journey thread.

#eventprofs #meetings #eventtech

We’d spent our time helping hospitality businesses be creative about selling event space during quiet periods and noticed a theme.

Everything online was enquiry driven with direct follow-up.

Even for simple, smaller meetings.

We started to 🤔 why given consumers can now transact online for pretty much everything

So we spent 6 months with events teams from hotels, conference centres, universities, business hubs, pubs and local councils to understand everything about events & meeting operations

We understood that larger events 👰 were complex & bespoke & needed more hands on service.

We understood that pricing was dynamic to capture demand, seasonality, reward loyalty & attract corporate clients.

We saw why this meant responsibility for quoting rested with 1-2 staff

We could see why this meant that it naturally took 🕰 to convert enquiries to bookings.

But we also saw some opportunities that this created...

Simpler bookings went through the same process when perhaps they didn’t need to be as hands on.

Certain prospects weren’t filtered out early when they could have been.

Our own mystery shopping for a🎄 party left us waiting on callbacks from 11/25 venues

So we set about building Switch to acknowledge the uniqueness of the events & meetings industry.

To retain the value of exceptional customer service. ⭐️

And at the same time simplify manual processes that weren’t valuable to venues.

We built a resource management system to manage all the particulars of your:

🕋 spaces
🥘 F&B services
📹 equipment hire
👩🏽‍💼 event management services
🚘 parking

We captured the intricacies of rate cards 💴 so they could adjust for:

Seasons
Demand
Budget performance
Discounts and incentives
DDRs
Customer groups
Individual clients

We allowed payment 💳 and cancellation terms to be flexible by service and by customer, so venues had the freedom to sell different packages to different customers on an individual basis

We enabled the venue to define how services were marketed through their website 👨‍💻

- simpler events available for live booking with dynamic pricing pulled in
- enquiry only process for more complex, larger events
- with the option to book venue tours though the website

We created an intuitive booking 🗓journey through the system using all the particulars of the services we’d captured so that ALL staff could respond directly to enquiries and booking requests from customers.

We managed everything through a central calendar that captured bookings and enquiries from the website, and those generated by teams through the system 🖥 in parallel so that there is no risk of double booking.

We built a simple CRM so that prospects & customer’s enquiry and booking history could easily be segmented to deliver 🎯 marketing campaigns & promotions

We created an email and SMS comms hub, with certain messages automated to be responsive, and >50 templates messages that could be quickly personalised by venues to efficiently deal with everything from cancellations to payments, chasing menu choices and sourcing birthday 🎂

We enabled the uploading of pictures and documents so that brochures & T&Cs could easily be added to comms and webpages, and services be presented online to maximise appeal to prospects 🌅

We built an interactive dashboard and budgeting tool so that teams can easily manage their performance on everything from revenue to supplier costs through the system 📲

Covid 🦠 arrived so we developed a means to pre-register guests and generate staggered arrival instructions, allow contactless check-in and provide specific track and trace reporting functions in the system using a digital guest book

And then we built a complete guest portal 😮 so that customers could manage their booking online to add services, make changes, invite guests, finalise agenda, make menu selections, pay and chat to the venue team

And (tech speak warning ⚠️) we built our API to simplify integration with best in class platforms for lead generation, CRM, accounting and travel.

We built Switch from what you told us. We think it’s pretty 😎. Book a demo and see how our clients are benefitting.