Rebuilding a platform behind 20 years of conferences

The Challenge

Too many steps

Getting from a conference programme to a completed booking took too many steps. The journey had been built around a legacy stack rather than around the person using it, and those who gave up phoned or emailed instead - pushing the work onto customer support.

Too many systems

Conference information and bookings were maintained by a large team across several disconnected platforms, which increased the risk of errors and left nobody able to see which conferences sold, which didn't, and why.

Nowhere to grow

Meanwhile, demand for recorded CPD content was growing fast. On-demand was the obvious next move, but content and media would have to be copied between platforms by hand - and selling an online conference is hard enough without a flawed experience.

Designing a checkout experience delegates want to use

• Eight interactions stood between a programme page and a completed booking, on a checkout that was one long page and hard to correct. Interviews and surveys turned up the useful part: the person booking often isn't the person attending. PAs book for executives, team leads book for their teams, and the old form assumed one person doing both.
• Each conference page works as its own landing page. Everything a buyer needs to decide sits at the top, the case for attending follows, and the page loads fast because it's where the traffic lands.
• Booking is now broken into tasks: company details, payment, and delegates where the conference has them.

One system instead of four

• Conferences, programmes, speakers, documents and video live in one content repository, created once and used everywhere, with the historic booking data imported so the record still goes back to the start.
• Bookings snapshot the conference as it stood and link to their invoice, so a record from three years ago shows what was actually bought.
• The booking cycle runs as a workflow, triggering confirmations, reminders and attendance certificates as it goes. Programmes, brochures and evaluation forms can be generated as PDFs from the same source, so the page and the file can't drift apart.
• On-demand runs on the same foundations. A recorded conference reuses what's already there, passcodes are generated on booking, and CPD certificates are issued automatically.
• The data can finally be got at. The team builds its own views and exports without going through a developer, and directors ask questions in plain English through an AI copilot, including viewing figures from the analytics system, with an additional MCP connector for power users.

The Results

90% reduction in drop-off

Nine in ten of the bookings that used to end in a phone call to customer support now complete online.

50-60% fewer interactions to complete a booking

Roughly half the steps it used to take, with nothing asked for that isn't needed.

85% less time to process a booking

Most bookings arrive complete and correct, so there's nothing to chase or re-key.

Booking administration cut by 75%

The rest has gone back to the business, on work that was previously being squeezed around administration.

On-demand accounts for 35% of total revenue

A revenue stream that didn't exist before the platform could support it.