Royal Holloway University

Two years ago, Melanie Loizou, assistant director Sales and Marketing at Royal Holloway, was given the unenviable task of turning the University's conference and events operation from an administrative nightmare into a slick, customer-focused enterprise.

Although Melanie's staff were hard-working, they were overwhelmed by paperwork, and hampered by "steam-driven" software. She explains, "We had a number of home made systems cobbled together from what was available on Microsoft, but none of them communicated with the other, which meant huge amounts of data entry."

Melanie calculated that each room booking took 20 minutes to complete, and with more than 4000 bookings a year, this meant that these transactions alone were taking at least 56 days to carry out. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. "Our billing was particularly atrocious," she says. "We literally had hand-written invoices and had to get our calculators out to work out deposits."

After looking at several software companies, Melanie decided that Kx from Kinetic Solutions was the ideal system to cut duplicated and unnecessary paperwork, and to integrate all parts of Royal Holloway's operation. After working with Kinetic to tailor Kx to suit the way Melanie's team worked, the system was implemented.

According to Melanie, the difference it made was "phenomenal". Time taken to book rooms went down to a couple of minutes; billing was automatically calculated and invoices were sent out on time; all the systems communicated with each other, which meant that information only needed inputting once. Melanie was delighted.

Melanie told us: "We went 'live' with Kx halfway through our financial year. At the time we were 30% behind budget. At the end of the year we were 30% ahead of budget. Without a doubt, Kx has been key in helping us achieve this fantastic result."  

Eighteen months on, Melanie has had time to reflect and she believes the benefits of using Kinetic Solutions' Kx software are even more apparent. "It has given us more flexibility," she says. "We now spend more time being proactive, and concentrating on providing a better service to our customers. I love the system and absolutely love Kinetics customer service – it's great."

As with all systems, refinements and improvements are essential if service and procedures are to keep pace with customer demands. Melanie has noticed that Royal Holloway's newer members of staff, who have never known other systems, are constantly putting forward ideas as to how they can do things better.

But making changes relies on Kinetics being responsive and willing to work with their customers. Have Kinetics risen to the challenge? Melanie says, "We go back to their help desk and make suggestions and put forward ideas to them. Because they're customer focused, they respond to our requests very quickly. Our feedback is taken on-board, taken seriously and dealt with."

Within the last ten years, Britain's Universities have been subject to massive change. Financial pressure combined with fierce competition in the bid to attract both students and conference delegates has meant that event organisers have had to significantly improve their commercial and service performance.

Melanie Loizou has spearheaded Royal Holloway's programme of change, and believes she has chosen the ideal partner for software and systems solutions. "Kinetic Solutions provide great customer service, an excellent help desk and the system is smooth and fantastic," she says.