Carmen’s Events was a small event planning business that wanted to streamline the administrative work of event planning and create a way for clients to be more involved and engaged. After learning the event planning process and numerous meetings with the event planner staff, we decided to implement the Tripleseat CRM system.
Platform Selection
Determining which platform would best suit our event planners, clients, and staff while remaining relatively affordable was no easy challenge. I began by conducting extensive market research into how other large planning companies utilized software and exploring popular SaaS review websites such as Capterra to compare features and even pricing before reaching out to a sales representative. Our major product requirements included:
Highly customizable event templates based on event type
Consolidated billing portal which allowed for credit card payments
Event planning worksheets which included all the important details and included access for clients to be more involved in the process
Limited per user licensing cost to keep overhead low
Easy printing capabilities to ensure day of event staff did not need technology on hand to perform their roles
During the early phases of planning the CRM deployment, I met with multiple stakeholders to outline the process they used during event planning.
Implementation
After much research and exploration with sales teams, our team unanimously decided to move forward with Tripleseat, a small CRM SaaS company based out of Boston, MA. Once we signed the contract we were paired with a Client Success Manager which also acted as our Implementation Manager. Tripleseat used Basecamp as our, well, basecamp for the implementation which included multiple onboarding forms and process maps.
Since we had already conducted a thorough mapping of our processes, this made implementation happen much more smoothly. We were also using Tripleseat in a way it was not necessarily designed for. The software was originally made for restaurants and event venues with physical space for events. I worked closely with our Client Success Manager to setup our instance appropriately since our company worked with multiple venues which we were not owners of.
An Event Detail page from the Tripleseat CRM which contained relevant planning details and the ability to easily export data in handheld printouts.
My Role
As the Operations Manager at Carmen’s Events (which unfortunately went out of business in June, 2019), I wore many hats which included our software suites. I directly advocated, planned, implemented, and carefully led process refinement of our CRM platform. Prior to Tripleseats implementation, all event planning activities were conducted either in Google Docs or on paper. Payments for events were only able to be accepted via cash or check in person which was inconvenient for clients who typically would make monthly payments for their event but only met with event planners every 2-3 months.
An agenda from an early implementation meeting in September 2018. I directly led the training of our event planners and held monthly meetings to work on compliance of the new process with activities focused on low-use or newly launched features.
