Ian Officer and the Pedalabikeaway team have invested time and resources into making the bike center one of the best in the country. Extensive refurbishments inside and outside on the trails make PBA the place to visit in the Forest of Dean. As part of the redevelopment Pedalabikeaway needed a website to match.
Along with working with Master Design to give the site much needed facelift, I also worked closely with Ian and Gareth the centre manager to make visiting the bike centre hire bikes book courses, and get the right information to the visitors before they arrive.
“Moving our booking process online was a major step-change for Pedalabikeaway. Do It Simply ensured that this was efficient and painless – but best of all we are selling more, and providing a much improved service to our customers.”
Everything that PBA was currently doing was done by hand or on the phone. It took at least 1 person working full time just to field phone calls and book out bikes, and sign people up for courses. We wanted to take away this headache, the difficult paper trail they were managing, and give time for the guys and girls at PBA do what they are good at. Help people get on bikes.
3 main areas of the business were moved online. Saving 40+ man-hours a week.
1. Hiring bikes
Between phone calls and a very over-complicated paper system, PBA was spending way too much time with the bike hire process. Occasionally details were lost, opportunities were missed when a phone call was missed, and during busy days at the centre the bike shop was under a huge amount of stress.
A process was designed and built so that all bikes could be hired online, including accessories. The bike inventory is always up to date so there never any duplicate hires, the hire shop is now open 24 hours, and best of all the hire forms are automatically sent the day of hire to be printed instead of scrambling for pens, customer details etc.
By providing bike hire documents and processes “it has transformed the lives of the guys in the shop”
2. Little Fodders Kids Club
PBA has been finding ways to get more people on bikes and nothing has worked better then their kid’s club. This is a weekly coaching session for kids of all ages to get down to the centre and onto the MTB trails.
This was another manual process moved online to make things easier for parents to see what’s on offer and to book. This also made it easier for the centre to manage who is coming to insure coaches are available.
Key features are full term or single class bookings. Ability to join the ‘Club’ and recieve discounts. Automatic class list is sent the morning of each session so the coaches know who is coming.
Little Fodder has grown to a great family day out enjoyed by children of all ages and skills.
3. Course and events
PBA holds many events at the centre. You can choose from demo days and MTB courses, to Night rides, and excellent coaching. Because they had no where to direct potential participants the classes only happened a few times a year when enough interest came in to fill capacity. Now with the website offering everything in one place, more events are happening more regularly.
Being able to offer more through the website has been a major goal accomplished.
What we did next…
DIS has worked hard to build a long term relationship with PBA, offering monthly updates/service/requests. Along with this we discuss how to improve the website and continue to engage with customers. Here’s what we did next.
1. Pedals had some great videography created and we wanted this to showcase on the website. We also wanted to insure that the navigation for bike hire was super easy to find. The result was a new homepage. If you haven’t seen the video and all in one bike hire.. check it out now.
2. Our discussions often involve how to make the process of booking Little Fodder Club and bikes easier. We rebuilt both of these processes to allow simple tick boxes for what the customer wants. Whether you are booking 3 out of 6 weeks of Little Fodder’s Club, or you need to hire 3 different sizes of a Cube Stereo, you can now do this easier then ever.
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