Case study

Powerful Hospitality Sales Solution

Custom architecture and Salesforce integration eases the management and sales of complex inventory for Wasserman

Custom hospitality solution with advanced automation

World map showing 30 Wasserman locations Wasserman is a worldwide hospitality organisation who summarise themselves as:

Harnessing the extraordinary power of sports, music, entertainment and culture, we deliver impact that is always meaningful, memorable and measurable. Forever committed to serving our clients, colleagues and community with exceptional insight, influence and creativity, while making a positive and lasting impact – we are the power behind YOU.

We worked with the UK arm of Wasserman to develop a fully integrated, AI-based and automated solution to replace their existing WordPress site. The existing system merely presented hospitality options but did not deliver e-commerce or any integration with Wasserman's Salesforce solution. It was onerous to content manage too, where content duplication was a necessity and past events needed to be removed manually.

Please read on to understand our holistic approach and phased rollout....

Deliver a framework powerful and agile enough to deliver all Wasserman's needs

Wasserman needed a new platform to deliver their entire inventory (1000s of packages across 100s of events 'moving' in time). Moreover, built-in marketing functions send around 2 million emails, SMS and WhatsApp messages every month, with deliverability rates of 98% or better! The new system needed to deliver personalised operational comms and exception triggers, provide business process automation and seamlessly integrate and synchronise all events, bookings and payments with Salesforce and Payday.

Our AI framework and best of breed third-parties for the win (again)!

We utilised our AI framework to develop a content hierarchy that simplified content management. The framework also paved the way to deliver seamless integration of leads, orders and inventory management. The centralised CRM synchronises with Salesforce to deliver inbound opportunities and other rich data to Wasserman's sales and marketing functions. It also executes sophisticated automated nurturing and personalised comms, advanced tag-based lead scoring and reporting metrics deliver the means to continuously optimise operational and marketing processes.

The project is delivering new 'phases' still, all of which build on existing successes

Since we approached delivering the 12-24 month project in discrete phases, we were able to get a massive quick win, as the new site was designed, built, populated, tested and live, with all inventory presented, integrated enquiry forms, etc in just 8 weeks! Subsequent Phases have been delivering improved automated booking communications and reminders. Extensions to the Hospitality Calendar, which is a key component that fulfils Wasserman's customers' and prospect's "research" needs. This has also delivered an amazing reusable component across the site - able to allow bookers to locate Hospitality events by category, date, price range, country, venue, availability, etc. It also serves Wasserman, encouraging personal sales for high-value bookings when required. Please see Wasserman's testimonial to get a sense of the success of this project at the end of this page...

Discovery phase and report was key to the successful outcome

We undertook a three-week discovery phase with Wasserman, via on-site meetings and interviews with all key stakeholders running against an agreed set of sought outcomes, prepared agendas and questions for each organisational unit, including operations, marketing, sales, internal IT and senior management.

The subsequent report ran to 52 pages and included a full breakdown of the recommended scope, approach, design, development, planning, budgeting and de-risking elements of the project. It also expressed priorities in terms of Phases that would deliver along a 12-24 month project.

Mockups and designs were provided too for public and logged in UI/UX elements, alongside dashboard representations that allow Wasserman staff to automate and execute tasks with high productivity and efficiency.

Intelligent data architecture to simplify content management

Phase 1 (initial website) was delivered in just two months after the discovery period.

It catered for replacing the old, cumbersome WordPress site with a new solution and data ideology. Allowing content population to become easy and intuitive. The new system requires no content replication like the old and past events are automatically removed.

The data (sports, events, packages, inventory) are well-structured and remain consistent whether they are representing single one off shows like Taylor Swift's gig, a complete fortnight of complex scheduling for say Wimbledon or a year of F1, with all of its complex options in venues around the world.

Making it easy

We delivered a session supported by imagery and documentation that provide the initial training and ongoing reference materials, an example of which is shown to the right.

Phased approach

Delivering smaller projects that are phased, is a great compromised between Agile and Waterfall project methods, allowing for smaller work parcels that are easy to articulate, test and rollout. An ongoing process of delivering against a big picture but with small teams allows for continuous improvement.

We're planning a few Phases ahead, to be UATing one phase while developing the next and planning/scoping the one after that, for example:

Full eCommerce across the majority of the inventory (like our MLB solution)
Extended multi-channel marketing, to include MailerSend, email verification, SMS and WhatsApp
Automated campaigns targeted directly around salesperson ownership and automated profiling
Automated requests for booker information prior to and after events
A centralised diary of all outbound comms, marketing, sales and operational
Use of our SOMA platform to deliver fully optimised customer and staff/task processes
Automated presentation of Sold Out and web-only inventory
Integrated blogging tools and automated e-newsletters
Integrated staff/task dashboards
Sales tool extensions and integrations
Automated finance and managerial reporting

Some statistics

1,345
Events and Packages at launch
1.2M
Emails targeted and delivered per month
8
Weeks to deliver Phase 1
3 - Lead developer, lead designer and project manager
Team size at S-Digital

We have been working with S-Digital on several projects over the years and most recently, we have collaborated to develop and launch our new Wasserman Hospitality website. It has been a complex journey and one that has the potential to be developed further. The result is a beautifully designed website that we are immensely proud of. Chris, Peter and the S-Digital team have consistently demonstrated creativity, efficiency, problem-solving and patience. They guided our marketing team through every step of the process, ensuring we fully understood how to use the website confidently and to its full potential. Our team at Wasserman highly recommends Chris, Peter and the S-Digital team and we look forward to continuing our collaboration as our marketing needs develop and our company grows.

Gemma Shepherd-Robinson, Marketing Director
Wasserman Hospitality Sales

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