BH Live manages multiple venues throughout the United Kingdom across various industries. Their venues include Cool Coast ice rink, Clip n’ Climb rock climbing, and Exploria - a family entertainment center that caters to all ages, from toddlers to adults. Each venue offers multiple options for admission, including various skate options at Cool Coast, sessions at Clip n’ Climb, and multiple lengths of time that guests can book at Exploria. Each venue is session-based, meaning that guests must book specific dates and times for their visit and choose the length of time based on availability and how long the guest would like to stay.
Before ROLLER, BH Live utilized its own system for booking. However, as they continued to expand into the leisure space, it became clear that they needed to find the right partner. When reviewing multiple software options, the interface for the staff and guests and the ease of setup did not match what they needed until they found ROLLER.
Easy setup
Hardware, software, and staff training all need to be considered during the setup or transition of core functional systems. Matt Willams, the business applications manager at BH Live, shares his experience with ROLLER: “it was really easy to set up despite having gone back and forth internally with a few different ideas about the need for waivers, adding of excluding grip socks and things like that. It’s quite easy to sort of tweak afterward. So that was our first experience with ROLLER, and we haven't really had any negative feedback about it also far from either our frontline staff or from like our end users to customers who are booking. It's just been quite a seamless process. So yeah, it's been really well received within the company.”
A great experience for staff and guests
Once implementing ROLLER at one venue, BH Live continued to see value in the system and expanded their use of ROLLER with two additional venues. Matt shares the key motivations behind the move:
“The key thing for us at the moment. Like a lot of our systems are managed centrally, and we just saw that it was easy for our staff to be able to go on and set things up, tweak it. Like it was really clear, like the layout of where to go. As I said, we've got other systems that are more complex in the way that you, if you had to set tickets up, it wouldn't necessarily work like that. So it's just nice that you can add the products, is clear of what you've got to put for the subscriptions, the tickets, and then it's easy to go and reference like another product if you're setting up a future one as well. So you can always look back and think, oh, this is a bit I have to tweak, you can copy and paste the text through. So yeah, from that sort of thing, it was great. And that's really what we wanted for our staff as well. We didn't want them to have to come on, be new to the business, have a new way of operating as well, and a new team of staff and having a really complex booking system. So the feedback from that has been positive and the same, I can say for the customers as well, really easy to use from a booking perspective when they're going online.“
As Matt explains, your venue management software must meet the needs of both your guests and employees. Guests must be given a clear path to purchase, and when there is friction in the booking experience, it can derail the entire relationship before it begins. For employees who are using the software regularly, it must be intuitive and straightforward for new employees to gain proficiency on the product quickly. Otherwise, they will spend too much time focusing on the transaction rather than spending their energy and talent on delivering a superior guest experience.
Matt goes on to explain his staff’s experience with ROLLER:
“From a staff training perspective… it was half an hour, tops. After that, they’re pretty comfortable. I think that one of the strengths is that it's just a really easy user experience for customers and the staff, it's obvious what to do if you've got the experience, and we've built software systems before, they've been more complex to set up. So from this side of things, it was nice and easy for us. And again, like I say that just the UI from a staffing perspective, for our perspective, it just makes it clearer. It's nicely sort of aligned.”
Exceeded targets
For both BH Live’s Exploria FEC and ice skating rink, ROLLER exceeded expectations: “It's exceeded budgeted targets, which is really good. I’d have no issues recommending [ROLLER]. We've gone from our first site to having three sites within less than a year. So I think that shows the confidence in the business that ROLLER has been delivering for us. And we don't see any issues if we had to roll it out further across the business” - Matt said.
