Musiikkitalo gets everyone singing from the same hymn sheet with Salesforce

While the venue aspires to keep growing revenues in the next few years, when the pandemic closed its doors to the public it decided to turn a disaster into an opportunity to improve collaboration and planning.

“When we began our platform optimisation our people were working in multiple systems, which was frustrating and time-consuming,” commented Carlsson. “Our booking system relied on someone manually finding which dates were available and marking events on a calendar, but there was no way to attach all the relevant information that goes into event planning.”

Luckily, this was no longer an obstacle during the pandemic, and enabled the team to focus on streamlining communications to keep stakeholders informed during changing government guidance, when events had to be moved, cancelled, or rebooked on a massive scale.

Behind every event, there are hundreds of actions that need to be coordinated before, during, and after the performance. While the sales team has multifaceted roles covering both sales and services, being able to give customers a smooth experience relies on centralized data and seamless collaboration.

“Visibility is really important to manage our venue in the best way possible,” said Juha Paaso, Sales and Marketing Manager at the company. “Our team needs to be on the ball to make sure we don’t have any bookings that clash, such as a brass band performing in a foyer next to a room that’s been booked for a seminar.”

Where the organisation had previously been using Salesforce to track billing, it decided to adapt Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to support the B2B customer experience from end to end.

Today, that journey starts when a customer books the venue for an event on the website. A simple web form captures data that is fed into Salesforce, helping the team to manage what’s happening in different spaces across the venue. Meanwhile, a third-party solution handles ticket sales, and this data is also captured in Salesforce and displayed in dashboards and reports to give customers full visibility of every aspect of their event.

Customer surveys are also used to capture and analyse customer satisfaction so the team can track where they need to make improvements to continue delighting their customers.

Musiikkitalo sells event and production services to both direct customers and event companies. In addition to in-house production services, essential services such as catering, ticket sales, security, and venue maintenance are provided by partner companies, and having multiple organisations working to tight schedules relies on great communication and coordination. To simplify running events, Carlsson decided to build a community on Experience Cloud to give customers, partners and colleagues a central place to log in and view all the information relating to each event.

The community will be integrated with Service Cloud to provide access to knowledge articles that help people self-serve for information, from B2B customers looking up how to use the booking system, to internal staff who need to know how to split a line item when they’re raising an invoice.

In the future, event organisers will be able to log in and view production data in a single place. “Making data more accessible isn’t just useful for us, it helps our B2B customers as well,” explained Carlsson. “The community will help to take away the guesswork so decisions can be based on real data, which will also help to build trust with our customers and give them more value from the partnership.”

The company also rolled out Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to streamline email marketing. “Marketing Cloud Account Engagement helps us keep in touch with our audience,” revealed Paaso. “We can segment our contact list to make sure we’re sending the most relevant content to the right people.”

With smarter segmentation, click-through rates are currently averaging at around 8%, with open rates of between 35-40%. The solution also helped the company to keep in touch with customers during the uncertainty of the pandemic.

“Eventually we’d like to roll out more marketing automation on Salesforce,” added Paaso. “We have complete confidence that the platform can grow and evolve to support our needs as we grow, and we couldn’t imagine life without it.”

Impressively, Musiikkitalo has not only transformed its processes with Salesforce, it’s done most of the work in-house. Trailblazer Carlsson commented, “We’ve used as much out of the box functionality as possible, but being able to make small tweaks really easily with drag and drop has been amazing to really shape and personalise the platform to our business.”

And it’s not just Carlsson who’s enthused by Salesforce, Musiikkitalo’s users are also invested in making the platform the best it can be and regularly request changes to enhance their working day.

Small customisations and automations, such as adding a button to change the status of a record after billing, add up to saving thousands of man-hours per year. And Salesforce helps the team to deliver better service to customers too, with an alert set up to remind them if they haven’t responded to a customer within 24 hours.

“We’re working towards Salesforce being our single source of the truth and developing smarter processes to provide an industry-leading customer service that will set us apart from our competitors,” concluded Paaso. “With Salesforce, our small team of 30 has the power of 100 people, and that will help us put on more incredible events to thrill and delight our audience.”