Refreshed September 2021
Liverpool Convention Bureau is the city’s award-winning official booking agency for organising events in Liverpool, boasting 500 active member businesses and more than 1,000 member contacts. The organisation has a focus on smaller events (600 pax or less), but provides accommodation and venue selection services for the city’s main conference and events venue, ACC Liverpool, which handles bids for citywide conventions.
To manage these inquiries, Liverpool was using the “Chaser” legacy system. However, in 2018 the system was discontinued. As a result, the Liverpool team moved to an in-house, spreadsheet-based enquiry log. Although it provided the ability to record enquiry numbers and types, it lacked rich information and provided an inadequate level of organisation and enquiry tracking.
Therefore, the search for a new CRM solution to facilitate bookings across the Liverpool City Region commenced. The team receives enquiries on a daily basis from clients looking for a suitable venue for their next conference, meeting or event; therefore, the new CRM/enquiry system they desired would enable enquiries to be distributed to their hotels and venues, as well as the facility to collate their responses. Initially, the team implemented the Gratis Venue Directory; however, as the system was not designed with CVBs in mind, it lacked the industry-specific functionality they desired.
This brought them to Simpleview. After weeks of searching for the perfect system, the Liverpool Convention Bureau implemented the Simpleview CRM in January 2019. The system met all of their criteria, with the added bonus that its cloud-based software enabled the team to access it anywhere, allowing the team to maintain quicker response times and take action on enquiries in real time.
“Simpleview has allowed us to become more efficient in managing our enquiries and our client accounts," said Jennifer Jenson, head of business tourism at Marketing Liverpool. "It has enabled us to be more transparent with our partner venues and hotels who can see the status of their enquiries at any time. The system enables us to report and track activity with our partners to help us refine our service and keep working more effectively to generate new business for Liverpool City Region. It is easy and straightforward to use and as it has been designed specifically for CVBs, it ensures that all the information we need is at our fingertips."
Other key features of the CRM proving to be a hit with the team include:
- Accounts – Facilitates the storage of both client and partner data and instant retrieval of contact information.
- Leads - Enquiries are recorded with a Lead ID for improved organisation and retrieval.
- Profiles – Research from conferences can be compiled for future reference.
- Partner Communications – Email campaigns can be created and responses recorded.
- Outlook integration - Enables communications between clients and partners for improved internal communications.
As the Simpleview CRM continues to scale with the organisation, Liverpool Convention Bureau will realize numerous benefits for their internal team and its partners, such increased team collaboration, enhanced reporting and improved relationships with partners and ambassadors.
