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Brief
In May 2009 Selesti were commissioned by BSM to quickly and cost effectively implement a seamless end to end online lesson booking website and internal web sales management system.
BSM were looking to make some radical changes to the company and invigorate the brand. In order for this to be achieved it was deemed essential to provide new and existing customers with the ability to book and pay for lessons online. Once the decision was made to build this standalone ordering website it needed to be done quickly and efficiently in order to showcase how BSM could respond quickly and intuitively to market trends.
The initial brief was simple, BSM required a flexible step by step standalone lesson booking website, which needed a simple CRM system that could be used in the call centres.
Strategy
The key objectives were:
- To utilise the Open source content management platform, Drupal and its ecommerce module, UberCart.
- To have a very simple user interface, that could be easily skinned and adapted for future promotions going forward.
- To use RBS WorldPay as the payment gateway
- To be quick to load, secure and very easy to use
- To quickly and accurately look up the costs and apply discounts dependent on postcode
- To have a secure and robust websales facility, for BSM call centre agents to manage bookings.
- To ensure the websales interface was quick and simple to use
- To enable leads to be easily distributed by managers to individuals in their teams.
- To enable managers to have advanced access and run accurate reports on the sales and sales agents.
Execution
With less than 6 weeks, to plan, design, build and deploy both systems, Selesti set to work to ensure the development process was as streamlined as possible so that the project could be kept on budget and schedule. We quickly wrote the functional specification for the both sites and worked closely with many departments within BSM to ensure the step by step customer journey was exactly as they wished. This included taking direction from many stakeholders; Fulfillment, Customer Services, Sales and Marketing, IT, Finance.
During the planning stage it emerged that there would be the added complication of ensuring the correct data was accurately collected and stored in a suitable format that could be easily transferred over to BSM’s current AS/400 system. This threw up some initial complications in terms of ensuring the formats were compatible so that all data from the new system could be imported to AS/400 seamlessly. The AS/400 system also had a unique method of calculating the discounts applied to lesson orders so this also took a lot of fine tuning and testing prior to deployment.
BSM's payment gateway of choice was RBS WorldPay. This was flawlessly integrated with the website to ensure payments could be taken quickly and more importantly, securely. This was tested thoroughly, simultaneously with BSM, to ensure that the payment gateway worked perfectly.
Results
On the Monday 1st June 2009, the new systems went live without a hitch. The new site was instantly popular, taking orders almost immediately. These were then dealt with quickly and easily by the team with limited training being required due to the simplicity of the system.
Head of Online and Retail Marketing Kristian Welch provided some great praise for the project, stating that "never had any BSM project of this magnitude been delivered on time and on budget and supplied bug free." Since the website's launch BSM are said to have nearly tripled their income, which makes this project one of BSM's and Selesti's biggest success stories to date.
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