Success Story: National Capital Authority

Georgia said the NCA staff was “a bit fed up” with their old system and it’s lack of customer support. “We couldn’t get the answers or simple solutions that we were shown in the original demonstration of the software—it’s like we were using a different system than the one we saw a demo of,” she explained. 

Although their team attended multiple training sessions for their previous tool, Georgia said the onboarding process was a “perpetual cycle of training that seemed to be redundant, without any sort step-by-step plan or manual. It felt like we were going in circles rather than moving forward.”

Due to this negative experience, some members of their team developed a cynical view of booking systems as a whole. “When we began discussing a switch to another booking system there were some jaded skeptics,” Georgia said.

“The customer care and strong commitment to our onboarding process began to stand out to us,” Georgia said, “EventBooking was keen to regularly train us in sessions that felt extremely organized and goal-oriented.” The NCA team also appreciated the helpful resources that accompanied each training, like the Knowledge Base.

Georgia added that well after their onboarding process, they continued to be impressed by the “incredible turnaround time” of the EventBooking Client Success Team. “We get some responses within an hour to two of emailing them—or if it’s urgent, I can pick up the phone and immediately talk to someone. In our line of work some things just can’t wait, so that has been quite reassuring to us,” she explained. 

“The more we interacted with VenueOps and the EventBooking team, the more our initial cynicism faded,” Georgia shared, “We realized everything the EventBooking team was promising, they were delivering. It restored our faith in booking systems because we have earnest, attentive, and ongoing support like we’ve never had before.”

Managing the details of an event is no small task, but the experience was made even more complex in their previous platform. “Before VenueOps, putting an event together could take 2-3 weeks,” Georgia said, “Now it’s easily a week, depending on the factors that vary event to event.”

Another challenge was the lack of customizable dashboards for high-level event information, or the ability to see different snapshot displays. This was especially difficult for the NCA team, as different members had an interest in different information, depending on their department or role. The layout of their previous reports and dashboards felt one-dimensional or one-size-fits all, and only catered information to a select number of staff members.

Georgia shared that VenueOps stood out for several reasons, but an important one was the layout of the reports they are able to make, and how easy it is to customize the information displayed. “Multiple team members were jumping for joy at the reporting capabilities,” she continued, “There’s multiple options and views to choose from, which is spot-on for what we wanted.”

 She also loves the overall ease of VenueOps and the processes it has simplified, especially in comparison to their previous tool. “With my role, I lived in our old system and I knew that I would be living in VenueOps too,” she said, “So I was really excited to see how much I was getting done with way less time and effort. Processes like generating reports, or the financials, or copying events over are so easy and automatic now.”

This is particularly helpful for the 200+ events that the NCA hosts annually, because VenueOps enables the team to easily copy and paste relevant information from each one year to year. “That made our decision to switch to VenueOps quite easy—how much it saves our team from day-to-day data entry,” Georgia concluded.

Because they often host triathlons or rowing events that span several days, she also appreciates the ability to turn a single event into a series of events.

“Because we weren’t set up for success with our initial training, not all staff members took well to our previous system,” Georgia said. “We were granted unlimited users after practically begging for it and paying an exorbitant amount of money, but even then, not all of our team members were too keen to use it,” she added. 

The lack of it’s adoption across their organization resulted in a lack of collaboration, with a lot of “back and forth.” Rather than keeping important information in one centralized platform, valuable details were stored in disparate locations. 

Georgia described their onboarding process with VenueOps as “quite simple” for their entire organization. 

“We shared our preferred workflow with the EventBooking team and they configured our VenueOps training around that preference, rather than expecting us to conform to a generic, default way of doing things,” she said, “That flexibility was important to us—the willingness to collaborate with us and set up user-defined fields, and so forth.”

The ease of their onboarding process resulted in an enterprise-wide adoption of VenueOps, empowering the NCA team as a whole, rather than different pockets of staff members. “I really appreciate the hierarchy of permissions within VenueOps,” Georgia shared, “because it simplifies the experience for each user and their individual needs. It feels tailored to each role and doesn’t overwhelm anyone with capabilities that are irrelevant to their day-to-day job.”