Our Work

Case Study: Novus Leisure

Novus Leisure Limited operate premium bars in high footfall venues in major urban markets, with a substantial food offer and corporate business. The company has a pre-eminent position in the West End of London and the City of London markets. Its Tiger Tiger brand has a strong presence in prime regional sites.

We’ve been working with Novus Leisure since mid 2005. They initially approached us to review their online strategy and after we presented our evaluation of their customer experience we were hired to re-develop, host and enhance their entire online portfolio.

The first three months of the project were spent producing a project specification; divided into the customer experience and functional administration. During the evolution of the customer focused design, we produced a set of “personas” based on existing customers. These included City PA’s responsible for organizing corporate events, influential young professionals and yummy mummies who generally take the lead in organizing the social calendar for their group of friends.

Working with Novus we identified a number of key project objectives:

• Deliver content in a helpful and visually engaging manner
• Provide a consistent user experience across all the sites whilst enabling individual brands to shine
• Enable venues to manage their customer relationships and event marketing whilst allowing the central team to oversee everything and undertake group marketing

We provided Novus with an online project management site where they were able to monitor the projects progress towards delivery, input issues and access latest version documentation.

During the latter stages of the development cycle we ran a number of training courses for more than 120 venue staff so that they could get hands-on experience of the new enquiries and reservations tools and then followed this up with a week of intensive on-site live testing with the same staff to ensure they were fully conversant in the new system. The development cycle took approximately 18 weeks including testing.

On the 3rd July 06 we launched 36 venue websites, the latenightlondon.co.uk and TigerTiger portals plus the CRM system for managing customer services.

For the launch we imported over 500,000 pre-registered users and sent each of them a personal email with their login details. We ensured that all the bookings and enquiries from the old system were migrated to the new CRM database.

With the emphasis on building long-term customer relationships, our focus on user experience has resulted in delivering a range of service tools that help customers manage their enquiries, guest lists, check and agree special details with venue reservation staff and organise their friends. We’ve also integrated a “user generated content” feature where customers are encouraged to create discussions, post content and invite their friends via e-mail to register and contribute.

To highlight seasonal promotions such as Christmas, Valentines, Halloween we’ve introduced a number of micro-sites, promoting key offers and encouraging customers to make specific enquiries directly. These promotions are reported on via the CRM system. For example, Novus are able to download a range of reports that detail up-to-the-minute party reservations, menu selections and financial forecasting for Christmas bookings for selected venues or across the entire portfolio, these reports also provide date-to-date comparisons against prior years so that true sales performance can be measured.

To support Novus in their New Year’s Eve ticket sales push, we integrated an eticketing facility. With a capacity in excess of 50,000 and a varied range of ticket options Novus Leisure required a system that would allow customers to purchase tickets securely, download them online and via email, and for the system to be capacity managed and integrated with the existing reservations system. The feature proved a great success and helped Novus increase group ticket sales by 40%. Moreover, the system’s now used for other ticketed and special events throughout the year allowing Novus greater control over promotional activities and maximising their return on investment.

A voucher system has recently been included; to increase new customer conversion and entice existing customers to re-visit. The feature allows vouchers to be created and deployed to particular target groups or to new customers for specific venues and are available to customers when they login to one of the websites. Vouchers may be either redeemed online when making an applicable enquiry or printed and taken into a venue. Vouchers have proved very successful in driving traffic to the websites.

To support the online promotions there is a a comprehensive email marketing feature within the CRM facility with which Novus are able to send permission based marketing emails to their entire customer database and view performance statistics for opens and click thrus’ for their campaigns.

We’ve built an API (Application Programming Interface) to extend the reach of the customer sign-up mechanism by allowing marketing agencies to query the customer database for new registrations before being accepted and included.

The search engine friendly sites meet W3C accessibility standards and have been optimised to increase their position on search engine results, a process which we continually attend to.

Please visit Latenightlondon.co.uk or TigerTiger.co.uk to find out more. We recommend that you register to get the full range of benefits available.

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