Southampton Football Club

To compete with more traditional venues, football clubs have to be able to offer a first class service. Using venue management, conferencing and events software that saves time and money and improves accuracy by streamlining bookings, administration and marketing is crucial in providing excellent customer service.

When Southampton Football Club Conferences was looking for the right software to meet its needs, KxPress from Kinetic Solutions came out on top. Sales manager Mandy Walker explains,

"We looked at a lot of other software, but we loved the flexibility Kx gave us. We were able to make changes to the software to suit the way we do things, and the service from Kinetic Solutions has been excellent. Everything we've asked for has been done.”

And Southampton Football Club Conferences has an extremely diverse range of offerings. Operating seven days a week, the Club offers 12 large conference suites, and 47 smaller meeting rooms, which are used for conferences, meetings, training courses, seminars, dinners, weddings, proms, concerts, exams, breakfast meetings, and business networks. In fact, you name an event and Southampton has hosted it.

Since going live with KxPress in September last year, Mandy hasn't looked back. "It's definitely saved us time in terms of paperwork. Much of what we did previously was manually typed out due to the variety of options we offered. This was particularly the case with contracts and menus. Now, we just add the alternatives and other information into KxPress and it produces contracts and menus automatically.”

Keeping track of suites and meeting rooms would be a challenge in itself, but when you consider that the largest suite has a capacity of 700 and the smallest 200, administration has to be tight. In addition to this, Conferences arranges catering and offers 21 varieties of audio visual aids from the basic whiteboard to plasma screens and lapel microphones. All of these variations have to be accurately noted and added to invoices.

According to Mandy, the accuracy of invoicing since Saints has used KxPress has been significantly better and has helped to generate more income. She says,

"There's less margin for error. Previously, we may have forgotten to charge for equipment used in a room because we didn't make a note of it. Now, it's logged on the system and it's automatically added to the invoice.”

As sales manager, Mandy also finds the Sales functionality within KxPress invaluable for client management, and highlighting vacancies and gaps in bookings so that she can mail shot clients to generate business when she needs to. The overall picture that KxPress provides allows Mandy to assess current and future trends in bookings and deal with them.

So, after nearly a year of working with KxPress, what's Mandy's verdict?

"My staff love working with it, and I really enjoy working with it. I couldn't imagine life without it.”