During MeetingsNet’s webinar on choosing the right app and provider, Brooke Gracey, senior mobile strategist at CrowdCompass by Cvent, used this case study to show the lessons learned by one company in search of an app.
Beachbody: A Customer Case Study
Beachbody, a provider of fitness, nutrition and weight loss programs, hosts an annual event for trainers called Coach Summit. The event offers attendees a chance to learn from their peers, network with experts, and lets them work out with Beachbody trainers. The event lasts four days, has 10,000 attendees, books dozens of celebrity speakers, and has hundreds of events on the schedule. It needed an app!
Beachbody found a basic provider that promised push notifications and content management. Beachbody was lucky, in that almost all of their attendees initially embraced this new convenience, but it was also unlucky, because soon after adopting the app the Beachbody team realized its limitations. They found that content was taking too long to load, push notifications weren’t working as expected, and when they needed the provider to pick up the phone and talk to them no support was available. It was clear this app would not do.
Beachbody needed a provider that would deliver an amazing onsite experience that could scale to support large events, and it had to have confidence that the product would work.
When Beachbody came to CrowdCompass, the team was able to demo the product and the content management system ahead of time. The company was also assigned an account manager, a support coordinator, and a 24/7 support phone line as well as interactive training and online planner communities to exchange tips and ideas with.
The team found that the content management system was easy enough to use that it spent less time building the app and was able to delegate app-related tasks to other employees without extensive training. Building the app was quicker than printing materials, and changes could be made in real time.
The case study helps illustrate the benefits of finding the right provider. Because adding content went so seamlessly, Beachbody launched the app earlier, and used it as a marketing tool. Beachbody is comprised of multiple brands, and it was also able to increase in-app engagement for those brands with sponsored push notifications and session branding, banner ads, customized icons, and links to profiles. Push notifications made event planning much more flexible. For example, they planned an outdoor event knowing that if the weather took a turn, they could send notifications and redirect thousands of attendees. When too many attendees were interested in one speaker for the venue, they could switch to a larger one, put the word out immediately, and include the information on the in-app interactive maps.
The result: Beachbody saved five months lead time, and $38,000 on printing for the event. Imagine what you could do!
