Earlier this year Damien Vincent, Head of Customer Services at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), set us an interesting challenge …

Could we integrate MAC’s website with their event management tool, Yesplan, to show customers room availability – live?

The goals

There were three goals behind Damien’s request:

• Free-up staff time. By reducing queries about room availability in general, but particularly rooms which aren’t available.
• Speed-up the booking process. By helping customers find available spaces more quickly.
• Innovation. MAC are always keen to try out new things and explore how technology can improve efficiency.
  

Working closely with both MAC and Yesplan, we made sure we pulled the right information from Yesplan’s handy API.

Quick prototyping of our solution tested its functionality, and meant we could experiment with how to communicate availability to users. (It also meant any issues we hit could be spotted and solved quickly.)

The result

MAC now have a mobile-responsive, easy-to-navigate online calendar showing live availability of each room. And new rooms can be added when needed, simply by putting the Yesplan API key into the website CMS.

This means the functionality is future-proofed, while the team at MAC develop their room hire offer.

"We're really happy that our customers are starting to use the API for projects like this. It's such an intelligent use of the technology that will directly lead to time saving and efficiency. That's what we and companies like Supercool are all about, making technology work harder so you can work smarter."

Patrick Morsman – Sales Manager, Yesplan

We’ll be working with Damien and the team at MAC to follow the impact of showing live room availability. We’re hoping to see the number of general enquiries go down, while the quality of any enquiries goes up.

We’ll also be looking into how other organisations can use this nifty functionality.

If you'd like to set us a challenge, get in touch today.