World famous supporters institution, and the biggest travel operator of overseas England cricket tours, Barmy Army, approached GAIN LINE after their recent decision to bring their travel operation in-house.
“We are delighted that we can now offer our customers a genuine one-stop shop solution for all of their Barmy Army needs. Where previously we had sold overseas tours on a separate site to domestic tickets and memberships, we are now offering a single basket solution to fans which is unique in the market.
We are also enjoying the efficiency benefits in our internal operations and have already seen the upsell and cross-sell functionality generating additional revenues. It was great working with GAIN LINE who quickly understood our unique challenges and delivered a solution and service that met both our, and our customers’ needs”.
Adam Canning, Commercial & Marketing Director at Barmy Army
Problem
They wanted to optimise their customer experience and provide the first ‘one-stop-shop’ of its kind in cricket, providing a single basket solution for tours, tickets, merchandise and memberships.
Throughout the process, these drains were highlighted:
- Customer data was handled by two different entities.
- A lack of clarity with offers and memberships.
- Membership card creation and tour manifests were still being exported into paper.
Barmy Army had multiple online platforms to manage their sales and memberships which were often siloed – this made creating and managing their customer’s tour booking and membership an intensively manual process.
Solution
Barmy Army wanted to identify where they could improve the buying process from a customer journey and booking perspective to enhance the online experience for their members. We were able to consolidate all of the Barmy Army Customer needs through a new one-on-one self-service portal.
During the project, we:
- Fully reviewed the existing membership process.
- Worked to determine how the membership process could be improved moving forward.
- Created links between memberships, merchandise and events.
- Helped and supported Barmy Army with the creation and structure of packages.
- Developed a fully integrated membership and e-commerce platform.
- Consolidated all individual systems into one.
Results
Following our project with Barmy Army, we achieved the following gains:
- The site hit the ground running, exceeding revenue expectations.
- A one-stop shop for customer process was implemented.
- We improved the membership process by amalgamating multiple sales platforms into one basket solution.
- All sales data was put into one place in their CRM rather than scattered around, so internally they could see the entire member’s service history. From this, they could better target them correctly and effectively.
- We optimised the membership process for Barmy Army, removing the need for manual intervention.
Moving forward, Barmy Army can serve their customers better with a single centralised customer base increasing the quality of communication and service whilst decreasing the reliance on paper and offline materials. Memberships are now recognised by the system with members having a better booking journey.
Project Team
Who worked on this project?
Mike Wildhood
Project Manager
Jonathon MacGregor
Senior PHP Developer
As the new system consolidates multiple functions across different business areas, an important part of the process was to understand the needs of both Barmy Army’s customer base but also their staff.
Having a solution that works across all parts of Barmy Army, from Ticket and manifest creation, to membership administration and direct debit management was crucial to the overall success of this project.
What we delivered removed internal inefficiencies and streamlined user pathways to create something that really resonated with what customers wanted from the site.
Kevin Williams,
Technical Director at GAIN LINE
