Introduction
The Old Chengdu Club – a 350 year old Heritage Listed Facility is a collection of Ming Dynasty buildings converted into accommodation, restaurants and leisure facilities.
Catering to the very highest end of the market in Chengdu the Old Chengdu Club was a firm favorite for events such as marriages and other celebrations.
Brendon Sandford, General Manager of the OCC was looking for a solution to a problem – how do we get the prospective clientele over the line when we are showing the event space – when the room is empty and bare.
The Challenge
The challenge was coming up with a unique product – and then the challenge was actually creating a functional APP.
The requirements of the client to create something that their salespeople could use to interact with the prospective clientele, long enough to be able to work through the hundred different concerns that often nervous brides-to-be held.
The challenge was to understand the entire sales interaction process in the function space and provide a tool that was truly useful for prospective guests and also fulfill the primary function of boosting sales conversions.
Digital Frontier created an interactive APP – Visual Event Space Management App (VES) which is a custom-built app which has been developed to allow function providers (hotels, restaurants, convention centers, exhibition centers etc.) to create a highly detailed and accurate visualization of their function venues laid out according to potential and active customer requirements,
The ability for you to produce a visual representation of customers’ ideas and layouts provides a vital new tool for your function/event sales team given its unique ability to greatly increase the conversion rates of customers viewing and assessing the function space for meetings, weddings, birthdays, social events and other customer functions.
Items such as number of people at tables, distance between tables, number of guests, table linen colour, table settings, flower arrangements, chair colours can all be set-up in your unique version of VES.
Additional features such as food and drink menus, function costing, room availability and bookings can all be added to the VES app giving an all-inclusive tool to assist in the booking process via an easy-to-use iPad interface.
The Result
VES provides a cost effective, results orientated approach to the marketing of your venue, allowing you to showcase the dynamic capabilities of your business’s venues no matter what the customer requests are.
Comprehensive market research has shown that there is currently no product on the market that does what VES does and gives function providers a revolutionary way to market their function space.
Client Testimonial
“I have been in the hospitality industry for 30 years and have to say that Visual Event Space Management App (VES) is simply awesome.
It is a tool I have always wanted to assist in the selling process. I can recall all the painful hours drawing out room layouts just for the client to say more changes were needed. Rooms being laid out incorrectly on the day due to poor communication and so on. All this is now history with the introduction of VES.
It is a unique app which: firstly, allows function providers the ability to present highly detailed and accurate visualizations of their function and conference venues and secondly, provide customers with an easy to use tool to create and plan layouts according to their specific needs.
Since using VES, our sales conversion rates have improved by 64%. Our clients in the past, were not able to visualize the beauty of our rooms (when not laid up) so we spent many hours (increasing our labor costs) doing mock lay-outs, to convince them our venue was ideal for their event.
We now have a app that greatly assists our Sales Executives when doing show rounds. They can present room layout options with color schemes as they sell. How brilliant is this!
A high percentage of our business now comes from other cities and international conferences. This I believe is solely due to VES. Clients are able to download the app and design their own layouts.
Many clients have said that this gave us the competitive edge when selecting the venue.
One word to describe VES – BRILLIANT.”
Brendon Sandford, General Manager – Old Chengdu Club
