Super Camps achieve 400% return on investment with Searchlight
The Client
Super Camps is the UK’s no.1 for childcare during the school holidays. The company delivers high-quality camps and courses for children aged 4 – 14 at over 80 school locations across the country. Super Camps offer a wide range of indoor and outdoor activities including quad biking, swimming and archery as well as specially themed camps and courses for budding adventurers, cooks, inventors and artists.
The Challenge
Bookings for Super Camps are made through its website www.SuperCamps.co.uk. However, the site had attracted negative comments and was experiencing a high rate of visitor drop off, with a significant number of people starting but not completing the booking process. Furthermore, there was no mechanism for Super Camps to adjust prices in response to consumer demand, so even more potential bookings were at risk.
With just a few weeks before the new booking season began, the window of opportunity for Super Camps to solve the problem was growing smaller by the day.
Searchlight, whose ID2 service specialises in delivering innovative solutions in just a matter of weeks, were brought in to run a series of intensive workshops. These sessions enabled Super Camps to look at their business from a different perspective and, using a range of creative problem-solving techniques, Searchlight helped the Super Camps team identify where and why they were losing customers.
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The Solution
The solution was to redesign the customer journey and streamline the process through the site. Within six weeks, Searchlight had accelerated the changes required to address the visitor dropoff issue and increase profits. They worked with Super Camps and their website developers to make significant changes, solving key problems which meant that parents who had been unable to find a Super Camps programme running in their area could go to the new mobile-enabled website and find a local camp straight away. In addition, where pricing and the bookings procedure had been difficult, that was all changed. The actual booking process has been made simpler, pricing easier and the site digitally enabled to interact with the latest mobile technologies so that parents can make bookings on their mobile phones.
Super Camps MD Guy Ker explained: “Understanding what was required of our e-commerce platform was essential; it is the point of contact between the customer and the business. In our case, we needed to give people the opportunity to find out very quickly what camps and opportunities there were for children and whether they exist for up and coming holidays. We were losing a lot of visitors to the site because when they looked for something in their area it wasn’t there. We turned that on its head to make sure there was always a solution when a parent typed in their postcode on the homepage.”
He added: “As a business, it’s easy to prioritise 30 things but in reality, you have to distil this down to three critical business changing things. What Searchlight did was help us understand what those priorities should be. They also set a deadline and got us there. Searchlight’s Chief Digital Innovation Officer was like a football coach. He installed the attitude that it was not a question of whether we would be ready – we had to be ready. He showed leadership, put himself in there and worked very hard. It was great!”
The new site went live on December 15, 2014, and, according to Guy, the return on investment is a massive 400 per cent.
In terms of the customer journey, we’ve improved throughput by about 30% and we’ve also improved yield on unit price by about 10%. Added together, these factors have made a significant increase in our profitability. We are really pleased with Searchlight, they were a really good investment.
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