The More You Use It – The More You Want It

In this case study, we look at a company and a website that promotes professional and personal development seminars. And we look at how the website evolved with use. Foote Francis - web devlopers listened and helped MJB Seminars translate business practices into an online system that effectively connected attendees and company staff to their seminars.

MJB Seminars was using the Mambo CMS (an early form of  Joomla CMS ) to manage their website. Five years ago, Foote Francis took over the management of the website (mjbseminars.com.au) and developed a smart online solution for handling MJB Seminars' rapidly growing market. The original website, only allowed the staff of MJB Seminars to add text, pictures and documents about their professional development and personal growth coaching. It didn’t allow the staff to interactively collaborate with their customers online.

MJB Seminars wanted to transition from a brochure website to an active online tool that they could use to communicate with new and returning seminar participants. Their staff wanted to automate some of the common activities like finding and inviting past attendees to the next seminar in the sequence. Management wanted to streamline the purchase and bank processing system and encourage attendees with additional payment options. A savvy email communication system was the first active module added to MJB Seminar's site.

Foote Francis implemented F2 Shout Out – a broadcast communication tool that allowed the staff to announce new events, products, tips and seminar locations to all their customers.

As the volume of seminar enrollments increased, it became important to deal with the additional transactions. Thus, Foote Francis added two more modulesm, F2 SignUp and F2 Sellout. F2 SignUp allowed customers to book and pay online for their seminars and also to buy training CDs. F2 Sellout manages the locations and number of seats available for each seminar. Most importantly, F2 Sellout has a calendar that provides options for customers if a seminar is full, such as suggesting an alternate date or putting a customer on a waiting list.

The F2 Sellout calendar seamlessly merges with the F2 SignUp online booking and payment. Online payments are automatically processed to bank accounts of MJB Seminars. The potential seminar attendees liked the calendar and MJB Seminars' staff enjoyed the benefits of streamline payments and deposits.

 

The more the customers and the staff used the website, the more features and functionality they wanted. And, unlike subscription or “out-of-the-box” solutions, Foote Francis was able to customize the online functions to best serve the customers and staff of MJB Seminars. At the next iteration of the website, Foote Francis upgraded the F2 Shout Out email communication system to a full Client Resource Management application - F2 CRM.

Now, the staff opens reports from F2 CRM that show individual sales, class enrolment lists or the daily breakdown of sales and bank deposits. Reports are easily created, saved displayed for repeat customers are grouped by the seminars they’ve completed and you can compare seminar sales by date, location, or program.. The staff can also manually manipulate the contact information for customers to send outbound messages or they can automate the process to send targeted communication, such as event reminders or specific promotions.

The F2 Sellout module keeps track of the classes that a customer has taken. For example, some seminar classes must be taken in sequence. When a customer logs into the website, the returning customer is offered the next available level of training. Event reminders are automatically sent through the F2 Shout Out system.

As the number of customers increased and the customer also grew, MJB seminars had trouble keeping track of customer data and when to send reminders to customers. Foote Francis creatively solved their problem by taking the data from the F2 Shout Out communication system and converting it to F2 CRM (Customer Resource Management). Through this module, the MJB staff not only managed contact information for online sales, online referrals and email marketing, but it also used F2 CRM to plan and track outbound sales calls.

To accommodate customers who could not pay for the seminars upfront, Foote Francis modified F2 SignUp to allow the customer to choose from one of several incremental payment plans.

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In summary, Foote Francis observed MJB Seminar’s business practices and listened to what the staff wanted the online system to make their work easier. With each improvement to the system, not only was the staff happier, but they and their customers also used the system more. MJB Seminar has greatly benefitted from the intelligent changes Foote Francis made to their Joomla CMS website and F2 PlatFForm modules. The website and online services were able to change over time to meet MJB Seminars' evolving and growing business. And, as MJB Seminar’s business grows, there are bound to be more improvements to the website and web applications.

• Joomla CMS - provides website structure and template, manages website text, pictures, attachments, menus and details
• F2 Shout Out - mass email and SMS communication
• F2 SignUp - online sales and ecommerce, online purchases
• F2 Sellout - event management
• F2 CRM - Client Relationship Mangement, contact detail tracking

If you have a rapidly changing business environment and you need a customized online service that fits your needs, contact Hayden at (AUS) +61 8 9228 9288 or through Foote Francis' website.

The Evolution of Managing Seminars Online by Hayden Foote is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License