Background:
The British Airways i360 is one of the country’s most amazing venues – and its sales manager has been telling how they’re keeping sales on the up and up.
Designed by Marks Barfield Architects, the creators of the London Eye, up to 175 guests can take a trip up to 450ft in the planet’s first vertical cable car, and there’s plenty of flexible and sophisticated meeting space and a restaurant in the beachfront building.
The challenge:
Sales enquiries started coming even in a year before British Airways i360 opened, and Sales Manager Sophie Shepherd recalls what a job it was to capture them all successfully.
“We relied on a diary – a good old fashioned paper diary!” she says in a new video that reveals how Rendezvous room and resource booking software from NFS Technology has created a booking system that lives up to this extraordinary venue’s reputation.
The NFS solution – Rendezvous room and resource scheduling software:
NFS training and client management expert Deborah Dew says her team spent a full planning day with British Airways i360 so they fully understood the needs of the business and could tailor the fully-hosted Rendezvous software system to meet their requirements perfectly.
“We arrive on site for the three-day install with the set-up documentation, and together we configure their brand-new system,” she said.
Benefits to British Airways i360:
“The system has enabled us to multi-task,” said Sophie. “As a small team, this is brilliant as it allows us to jump from one project to another, whether it’s checking availability of a room, or checking a contract for a client or even issuing an invoice, the system has worked really well for us.
“The reporting is a blessing, she says, because now we know what provisional business is on the books, as well as what tentative and contracted business is confirming.”
Because Rendezvous is cloud-based, it has helped the operations team who hotdesk or work from laptops, because they can see at a glance what business is scheduled months ahead.
“We used to put it in an Outlook calendar, but thankfully we don’t need to do that anymore, because it can go straight into the diary system.”
British Airways i360 like the way NFS were able to customise Rendezvous for them, so – for instance – booking confirmations carry their branding, for which they have extremely strict guidelines.
The training was a breeze, too. “It was a pleasure having Deb on site, who is always an absolute pleasure!” said Sophie.
“With going through the training bit by bit we realised how easy it is to pick up on the system and how simple it is to add an event, room or even a menu into the system, or change pricing.”
The Rendezvous system is also future-proof, with the British Airways i360 team fully able to configure it themselves going forward.
“As we are such a huge venue on the sea front, people don’t realise we’re such a small team, so we chose this system so we could add in any packages and mould the system as we needed for the future,” said Sophie.
And she’s keen to praise the way NFS works with British Airways i360, and the power of the Rendezvous system.
“It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with NFS, and I honestly don’t know what I would do without having the system,” she said.
Watch our latest client installation video: