GolfNow was struggling with managing its administration of customer bookings until it partnered with Skuid. Michael Barnes, Director of Salesforce.com Administration at Golf Channel, discusses the challenges GolfNow faced and how Skuid provided practical solutions.
GolfNow likes to say ‘yes’ to innovation – and that’s where its journey with Skuid began. The online tee time booking service needed a better way to manage business process automation for its sales support organizations using Salesforce.
That meant applications and features that met the needs of everyone, including custom dashboards and better mechanisms for data entry. And without time or budget for writing a lot of custom code.
Challenge
GolfNow, a subsidiary of NBC Golf, is one of the world’s largest online tee-time distributors. It helps over 3.5 million golfers book their tee-times across the United States, Canada, Mexico, UK, Ireland and Australia.
GolfNow discovered that its technology was making it difficult for them to spend much-needed time with customers and that it couldn’t access valuable data and insights about what was happening in its business.
The company had a business plan process that spanned multiple CRM objects. Users had to enter data in multiple places, whether it was in opportunities or on a specific business plan. They had to click on multiple different tabs within Salesforce to get to the right place and filter to the correct records.
“It was getting tedious for the team,” said Michael Barnes, Director of Salesforce.com Administration at Golf Channel.
GolfNow needed a better way to manage business process automation for its sales support organizations, but they didn’t have the time or the budget to customize its applications by writing code.
Solution
GolfNow used Skuid to enhance business processes and transform the way they manage, view and enter data, bringing all the information into a much more streamlined UI for every team. It simplified its operational processes for its support and sales teams alike, creating a seamless experience that means less time tediously entering data and more time on jobs that matter.
“We have three and a half million golfers who now have a frictionless booking experience on the GolfNow platform and book at over 6,600 courses worldwide,” said Barnes.
With just two Salesforce admins, GolfNow uses Skuid to design and deploy multi-functional list views and detail page layouts for its org of over 1,800 users. The dashboard meets the needs of everyone in the organization.
Each user can filter the dashboard to see data relevant to their role. Leaders can use it to gain insights into the organization as a whole, without having to constantly run and update reports.
GolfNow also rolled out new account views, account page layouts and a custom series of objects around an incentive plan for the sales team.
“Skuid opens doors; it adds a new set of tools that I just didn’t have previously,” Barnes said.
Results
With just two Salesforce administrators and over 1,800 people in its org, GolfNow sees major time-saving benefits from using Skuid to expedite development and deliver features not previously available.
“This has been a game changer,” said Barnes. “I have people coming to me wanting something new and it’s done in Skuid.”
By building a single dashboard for the organization, instead of creating multiple dashboards for each specific need, GolfNow also saved time and headcount, as managing multiple dashboards would have required additional staff.
“I can’t even tell you how much money we save not having to hire developers at the rate developers charge and not having to hire additional staff to manage all these different processes,” Barnes said.
Even for complex pages with multiple features and models that need to be developed, Barnes can now build these within a week. He’s able to sit side-by-side with users and build out basic proofs of concept to meet its needs. His intern built a basic page within a day.
Because the apps are so quick to create, Barnes can build user loyalty and evolve the apps on a continuous basis as end-users understand what’s possible with Skuid.
