Enabling Real-Time Reservations
Party Rental Website Development
Our Events Rentals client is a boutique events rental business, operating out of California.
They are driven by excellence in services, offering unique products and delivering the best customer experience they can.
As part of their brand and business evolution they wanted to advance the capabilities of their website to enable clients to do more and in turn improve operations by automating repeatable and foreseeable processes.
The Website Development Challenge
In an effort to improve their clients user experience, and enable clients to me more self-sufficient Encore Events Rentals hired us to:
- Develop their Customer Portal
- Develop real-time reservations functionality
- Evolve their existing wishlist experience
Solution 1: Party Rental Customer Portal
In collaboration with the company’s ERP, we developed a portal for the event rental’s customers which requires them to login. In the case a user forgets their login credentials, they can reset without involving the company’s staff.
The client portal enables users to:
- View current balances
- View open tickets
- View open invoices
- View closed invoices
- Download PDFs of open tickets and invoices
- Make payments
Solution 2: Real-Time Reservations
To resolve the bottleneck created by the company’s business hours we enabled a complex, custom-designed eCommerce solution.
Our client’s calling card in the events community is their deep understanding of what it takes to successfully run big events, and the format in which contracts are delivered. As glamorous as an event can be on the outside, the backend operation needs to be succinct and simple.
We took the concept of eCommerce and made it fit the industry’s models, rather than expect the industry to change the way they do business. This eCommerce platform replicates the contract professional users are used to seeing and operating with.
That allows them to browse the company’s online catalog, add, modify, and rearrange items as they need to, select event locations, set delivery dates, and ultimately process their reservations in real time. All done in a format that makes sense to them.
All of the convenience these users get is powered by enterprise resource planning (ERP) system which accommodates the company’s specific business rules around inventory and scheduling thresholds, associated fees and taxes, mandatory and options services, and so on. This prevents the warehouses or delivery teams from overbooking and notifies users and staff when a phone conversation is necessary to resolve specific scenarios.
An important aspect of enabling this functionality was to allow the business to determine what clients can have access to real-time reservations.
For everyone else an alternative solution was developed…
Solution 3: Wishlist and Request for Quote
As private parties plan their events the company wanted to enable the functionality to add products they like from the catalog to a wishlist.
The wishlist achieves the following purposes:
- Create an account
- Create a list
- Add, remove or change the quantities of items on the wishlist
- Save your progress for later
- Share your list with other parties
- When ready with a couple of clicks request a quote for the wishlist items
Bonus Solution
As part of advancing this website’s experience, we also worked with their team to create collections for products where it made sense. Depending on whether the user is logged in and what type of account they have they would be able to add to a wishlist only or a reservation they have in the works.
Ultimately, we were able to deliver solutions, which were developed to fit this events rental company as a glove. More importantly, these solutions enabled both internal staff and online users to utilize time better and improve the flow of work.
