How Tripleseat Helps Kingmakers Save Time, Manage Event Details, and Increase Efficiency
If your company uses multiple applications, documents, and spreadsheets to oversee events, you know how exhausting, stressful, and time-consuming it can be to rely on all of these sources to get an overall picture of your event management.
Learn more about how Tripleseat’s all-in-one dashboard brings every detail together to help one company manage its event business and increase sales without increasing its workload.
Before Tripleseat, Kingmakers managed their events with Google Drive spreadsheets and documents, creating their own backend system by copying documents again and again. This manual process worked for their small business for a while, but it limited the number of events that they could handle at once given all the logistics each event required. With Tripleseat, they were able to organize and update all event details in one cloud-based system, increase efficiency across the internal team to focus on other tasks, and handle more events simultaneously with increased optimization.
About the company
Kingmakers is a fully virtual events team that facilitates board game-centered experiences for corporate B2B clients. A once brick and mortar business with locations in Indianapolis, and Columbus, Ohio, Kingmakers moved fully virtual like the rest of the world amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
Kingmakers found their virtual sweet spot through success with corporate clients trying to engage remote employees with a fun and unique team bonding experience. Kingmakers considers factors such as group dynamics, size, and engagement goals in order to find the best solution for their clients.
The Kingmakers game guides use Zoom video and multiple screens in order to mimic gameplay mechanics for their groups of six players to 80 players, utilizing Zoom breakout rooms to keep the setting intimate. Kingmakers also works with local and national food and beverage partners to offer virtual beer tastings, paired bites like charcuterie boards, and sweet treats to be sent to the game participants.
A virtual experience with Kingmakers is certainly one that all team members will remember and can help bring camaraderie and unity back into the workplace. According to Kingmakers Founder & CEO Malika Jacobs, “People say it’s unlike anything they’ve experienced before, and I think that is because it is facilitated.”
Jacobs explained how the only time many teams experience full-on facilitation in a workplace setting is in a more intense workshop environment, which is less interactive and more of a presentation mindset. Amid this pandemic, the scheduled happy hour became the new go-to for virtual teams, but even then, a normal happy hour often continues the existing status quo and dynamics within a team where the same faces attend and participate. Jacobs said, “(an experience with Kingmakers) is fully facilitated; it is engaging, participant-centered, and everyone is being involved. But it is not a heavy professional-centered development session.”
Kingmakers focuses on the power of gameplay and how it can showcase creativity, new ways of thinking, and problem-solving skills among coworkers. Kingmakers clients often walk away from an event with a new perspective on their fellow colleagues and even some inside jokes to laugh about together in the workplace.
Challenges and objectives
Prior to using Tripleseat to manage events, the Kingmakers team was using Google Drive documents in order to create BEOs and contracts, email messaging to send documents back and forth with clients, and manually adding specific Zoom links (the Kingmakers version of a private events room) to individual documents.
While this process worked for a little while, it eventually became both time-consuming and overwhelming. Jacobs said there was always a risk for something client-facing going wrong due to the potential of human error. After a fully-booked December 2020 events season, Jacobs realized that it was time to turn to technology to help Kingmakers manage all event logistics in one easy-to-use platform.
How Tripleseat helped
Jokingly, Jacobs expressed how Kingmakers may be the “oddest use case for Tripleseat” given the business’ fully virtual nature, but it works just the same to manage every event detail they need it to. As a company, the transition from in-person events to a virtual business model took a bit of planning on the back end, which is why Tripleseat has been so helpful to manage all the event logistics.
Jacobs said Tripleseat’s cloud-based ability and real-time updates are a huge timesaver when it comes to making changes to client requests.
“The cloud-based application is huge. The fact that details get updated across all documents is so important, so we can go back and forth with the client any number of times because it’s so easy to update.”
Clients are blown away by how quickly updates can be made, further showing Kingmakers’ ability to be organized and on top of things when working out client-facing details. Prior to using Tripleseat, the Kingmakers team had to update each individual document whenever the client made a change.
Now, Jacobs said, “it does not feel stressful to accommodate change requests from a client because it is so automatic and flows so seamlessly through.” Jacobs explained her satisfaction with Tripleseat’s electronic payment ability and client portal that gives access to all docs in one place. The ability to pay and sign documents online feels “really secure for the clients.”
Communication with customers is an important part of the event planning process, and this holds true at Kingmakers as well. Jacobs said that at least three Kingmakers team members are involved in every event’s preparation, so using Tripleseat to house all communications between team members and clients keeps everyone up to date on the conversations. This has been much more efficient than relying on large email threads housed in multiple email inboxes.
Tripleseat has become a major tool for the Kingmakers team to manage all event information consistently and in one single location. Jacobs described how helpful it is to search for data in multiple formats within Tripleseat, through the calendar and documents for example. Tripleseat is easy to navigate once inside the platform. Plus, the team uses the robust reporting within Tripleseat and they’re excited to dive deeper into the reports as the business continues to grow.
In the early stages of using Tripleseat, Jacobs and her team heavily relied on the Tripleseat support team and applauded them for their helpfulness during the setup process, especially for the unique use-case of the product. The team also went through Tripleseat University and continued to use it as a resource when questions arose.
Results
Tripleseat has helped Kingmakers to increase efficiency across the company, freeing up time for upper-level management of the small business to focus on the business’ growth as opposed to stressing out about managing the event schedule.
Kingmakers can handle more events at one time now with Tripleseat than they could with their prior method. This, in turn, brings in more revenue for the company. Jacobs said that the workload feels much more manageable, and the idea of adding more to the events calendar is not daunting, because using an event management platform makes the planning process so much easier.
Future plans
Kingmakers is excited to move forward with scaling their business by growing their game guide staff in order to accommodate even more events. The Kingmakers executive team also continues to grow with the addition of new team members, who together will help the business set and reach bigger goals. After an eventful time of essentially changing industries with a fully virtual business model, Kingmakers is embracing the new and working to perfect the processes in place, using Tripleseat as a tool for everything related to events. To learn more about Kingmakers, visit their website at kingmakersfun.com.
Want to improve your event management efficiency just like Kingmakers did?
If you’re not a Tripleseat customer and you’re interested in learning more about Tripleseat’s event management features and how they can grow and manage your private event needs, schedule a demo at your convenience to take a closer look.
