Case study

MLB - Automated eCommerce and Customer Portal

Automating Corporate Hospitality

We've worked with CSM Hospitality for a couple of years and, in that time, we've built an email marketing and landing page platform that injects prospect data into Salesforce, i.e. our digital marketing and 'magic glue' mix.

Around 9 months ago, we all saw an opportunity, with CSM winning the bid to provide corporate hospitality for the Major League Baseball (MLB) London Series, to develop a standalone ticketing and customer portal that could be extended to support other sports in the future.

Traditionally, running events like the MLB London Series involves a lot of sales activity, taking payments over the phone, manual Salesforce tasks, chasing bookers by phone and email to understand their special requirements and reminding them of the dates for downloading their tickets, etc.

This year (2023) was different, we automated almost everything for CSM; creating a site that allowed people to research all available packages and add them to a saved basket and subsequently buy online. Inventory was kept up to date through deep integration with Salesforce on our side and payments were made through Stripe. Orders were then injected into Salesforce and the remaining inventory was updated. Bookers were then able to login into their MLB dashboard and review their orders, request changes, update any specific requirements they might have, update their contacts, etc.

Finally, our solution then despatched three sets of fully-personalised email communications to guide bookers through where to go on the day (personalised based on seat or private box), confirm their itinerary (based on their chosen package(s)) and auto-remind those bookers who had not yet completed their special requirements form in advance of the event.

The process saved CSM a huge amount of time. Thus, staff were able to focus on customers and ensuring a great couple of days was had by all!

Footnote: The whole automation process was repeated without change for 2024, allowing Wasserman (who acquired CSM Hospitality earlier in the year) to deliver their exemplary customer services with only content changes to the site!

Wireframing and UX

Wireframing is an essential component in the process of creating user-friendly and visually appealing websites and applications. They play a crucial role in the early stages of web development, helping to conceptualise and structure the user experience before diving into the actual design and development phases.

UX design goes beyond wireframing and encompasses a broader scope of activities, including user journey mapping, usability testing, and prototyping. They act as a communication tool between designers and developers facilitating discussions and iterations before proceeding to the visual design stage.

For this project we produced detailed hi-fidelity wireframes showing clear user interaction points and user journeys. Following this initial process, we moved onto the final design stage using Adobe XD to share our design concepts based on branding guidelines provided to us from CSM and Major League Baseball.

The designs went through a quick sign-off process by CSM and MLB, with only minor alterations required which in turn allowed for the development process to start earlier than planned.

Salesforce Integration

By integrating Salesforce APIs into our web solution, we were able to leverage the power of Salesforce's extensive capabilities and data to enhance the MLB's web application's functionality and streamline business processes.

Our approach allows for seamless communication and data exchange between Salesforce and the web solution, enabling our solution to leverage CSM's customer data, automate workflows, and drive efficiency in all related operations.

This was a key requirement from CSM who rely on Salesforce to capture potential leads, customers and customer orders which lead to event bookings.

With this in mind we built a system that streamlines the process and created customer records in Salesforce at the point of sign-up. Their Salesforce user record is linked to our own AI CRM to allow for tracking through the website interactions.

The tailored checkout process creates 'opportunities' directly in Salesforce which are set to pending or processed depending if payment was successfully received or not.

Additonal data was captured in Salesforce to allow CSM to streamline their internal processes and productivity.

Email Notifications

A core feature of our Marketing Automation (MA) tool is email and SMS delivery based on a set of developed rules. This allowed CSM to create a selection of MA journeys that triggered customised email campaigns on key dates leading up to the MLB World Tour London 2023 event in June.

Three separate emails were dispatched to customers who booked the sporting event, these emails included personalised information tailed to the event package and date they purchased. For example: