Enabling Customer-centric E-business for 

The Millennium Partners Sports Club

 

A Case Study

The Client
The Sports Club LA, owned and operated by Millennium Partners Sports Club Management LLC, is a chain of upscale fitness clubs in New York, Miami, San Francisco, Boston, and other cities. Clubs offer amenities such as spas, restaurants, fitness centers, swimming pools, and basketball courts to over 40,000 fitness enthusiasts.
The Opportunity
The web is an ideal medium for reaching The Sports Club LA’s target market — people typically well-educated, concerned about health and fitness, and discriminating about quality and style. Despite a customer base that is increasingly web-savvy, the company had never invested in a significant web presence. Its new management decided that this situation had to change, and commissioned a new e-business website to accomplish the following:
  • Drive online sales and generate leads through the web
  • Improve the member experience and increase retention rates by leveraging greater interaction online
  • Reflect the upscale nature of the brand with an attractive design
Achieving these goals would require a level of functionality far beyond the company's current website based on outdated technology. Millennium Partners decided to reach out to experts in Web 2.0 technology to deliver an extraordinary customer experience while creating new opportunities for online sales and marketing.
The Inkriti Web 2.0 Approach
Inkriti is a leading technology consulting firm that specializes in leveraging Web 2.0 for enabling customer-centric e-business. The company's solutions combine next generation web 2.0 technologies in unique and innovative ways. Key elements include:
  • Proven open source software that provides the functionality of proprietary software while providing huge cost and flexibility advantages
  • Mashups that bring together applications with desired features, avoiding the need to build them in-house
  • Rich Internet and multimedia technology that creates a memorable visitor experience that builds loyalty and helps win new business
  • Web services that facilitate real-time integration between systems, making data actionable when it is freshest
The site Inkriti built for Millennium Partners demonstrates the breadth of its expertise.
Open-source content management with Drupal
Challenge:  The Millennium Partners Sports Club has clubs nationwide which publish their own content: local news, promotions and events, as well as activity calendars which must be kept up to date. This dynamic content is managed by dozens of administrators across the country. It has to be very easy to create, get approval, and publish to the website. Commercial content management systems such as Interwoven or Vignette are expensive and beyond the budget range for the project.
Inkriti Solution:  Inkriti has extensive expertise using Web 2.0 open-source content management systems such as Alfresco, Drupal, Joomla, and others. Inkriti selected Drupal as the best fit for Millennium Partners because it allows not-technical users to easily create, manage, and publish web content of all kinds. As a next generation content management system, Drupal provides a simple, flexible solution for managing all content associated with The Sports Club LA site - from news to forums, calendars and special events. The solution brings a new level of marketing agility to the online channel, allowing local staff to be extremely nimble in keeping the web site current.
Open-source site search with Google Mini
Challenge:  A rudimentary website search using standard database queries is inadequate for effective e-business. Even simple search functions like plurals or synonyms yield poor and misleading responses, resulting in an unsatisfactory customer experience, an inability to find relevant information, and a low conversion rate. Commercial systems such as Endeca and Easyask provide comprehensive search solutions, but at prices from $50,000 to $250,000 these were out of range for the project.
Inkriti Solution:  Inkriti has expertise on the open-source Google Mini and Lucene search engines, both available at prices from $0 to $2000 while providing functionality very similar to much more expensive solutions. After thorough evaluation, Inkriti implemented Google Mini, delivering the searching capabilities of Google Search for web sites of mid-sized enterprises like The Sports Club LA.
Open-source actionable reporting with Google Analytics
Challenge:  One of the keys to running a successful e-business is the ability to understand site activity: what draws visitors, their favorite pages, what web site they came from, their geographic location, etc. While there are commercial software providers such as Omniture or Fireclick, their prices were out of reach. Furthermore, Millennium Partners was not interested in getting locked into a long-term contract and billed on a monthly basis.
Inkriti Solution:  Inkriti used Google Analytics, providing the same reporting and analytic capabilities as the high priced alternatives. It is free, intuitive to use, and easy to implement by embedding a simple script into the web site header page:
 
In addition to website reporting (visitors, sources, conversions, etc.), Google Analytics integrates with Google Adwords to help Millennium Partners track performance of its online advertising campaigns. This comprehensive view into site traffic and visitor behavior is invaluable in helping Millennium Partners fine-tune its website, run targeted promotions, and get maximum value from its advertising budget.
Real-time sales agility with Web Services
Challenge:  Millennium Partners interacts with its customers using the Salesforce CRM system. The website manages two important customer interactions: sales leads, where a customer fills out an online form and requests that a sales rep contact him or her, and customer feedback. Millennium Partners wanted all sales leads and customer feedback originating at the website to flow directly into Salesforce, eliminating the delays of batch feeds or faxes.
Inkriti Solution:  Inkriti leveraged Web services to forward sales leads in real time from the website to the Salesforce system, which automatically generates an "Opportunity" at the area club so that an assigned salesperson can follow up. Customer feedback follows a similar approach, with Salesforce automatically opening a "Case Ticket" for action by a local customer service rep. Rather than waiting of hours or days, critical sales and customer information becomes actionable instantly.
 
Common look and feel using Mashups
Challenge:  As a large chain offering thousands of programs - Yoga, pilates, personal training, aerobics, racquetball, swimming lessons, etc. - Millennium Partners needed a robust scheduling system able to communicate event calendars for every club. Building such a system in-house would have been extraordinarily expensive. Although there are several low-cost vendors that offer this functionality, integrating their system into the website would have been unattractive and cumbersome. For example, clicking on a "View Schedule" link would open a new window with a completely different look and feel - creating a disjointed customer experience that jars with The Sports Club LA's upscale image.
Inkriti Solution:   Inkriti used the "Mashup" approach to seamlessly merge the Trumba Event Calendar into The Sports Club LA website. Information generated by Trumba is separated from its standard presentation format and given a different look and feel. Rather than linking to a separate window, users now see the complete event calendar within The Sports Club LA website, with the same elegant design.
 
A more interactive user experience with AJAX
AJAX web technology provides a more interactive and responsive visitor experience. AJAX is used in the following areas:
  • Searching: AJAX recommends keywords as users type a search term, allowing people to find what they’relooking for quickly and easily. Results of user input appear immediately, without the need to refresh a page.
  • Forms:  AJAX validates fields in real time, rather than submitting the form and waiting for feedback.
The Results
Millennium Partners now has a web site that mirrors the upscale appeal of The Sports Club LA brand while building closer connections with its members - both current and future.
  • Sales agility
    • Sales leads and customer feedback flow directly to assigned reps
    • Response times to incoming leads reduced from several days to a few hours
  • Marketing agility
    • Business users can easily publish local events and class schedules
    • Content publishing time reduced from several days to a few hours
  • Development agility and value with open source software
    • Reduced licensing and deployment costs
    • Fast customization for client workflows

“With help from Inkriti, we’re connecting with our market, engaging our members, and building The Sports Club LA brand nationwide,” explains Henry Svendblad, VP of Technology of Millennium Partners Sports Club. “Our new web 2.0 site is a cornerstone of our growth strategy, giving us capabilities previously unavailable. It’s also great news for our marketing and sales teams, who greatly prefer a solution that’s fast and easy to use.“

“This has been a very rewarding engagement,” adds Svendblad. “Inkriti’s experience building e-commerce sites for major retailers positioned them perfectly to deliver a powerful online channel targeting our own needs. They understood our business thoroughly, and their use of open source software and global resources help provide a very attractive return on our web 2.0 investment."


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About Inkriti
Inkriti is a technology consulting company that is a leading provider of Web 2.0 Solutions for customercentric e-business. Our solutions leverage Web 2.0 principles to attract, convert and retain more customers online. And, our Global Delivery methodology results in a 65% savings in IT costs, while providing resource flexibility and reducing time-to-market.
Inkriti is headquartered in Boston, MA and has a global technology center in India.