Rugby Borough Council

Toplevel BookingOffice works hard to help Rugby play

Rugby Borough Council rightly prides itself on the range of sports and activities on offer in the birthplace of rugby football. Alongside facilities for team games such as soccer and gaelic football, Rugby provides a wealth of workshops, sports courses and other activities for young people. The council wanted to allow members of the public to be able to book sports pitches and holiday activities through its Customer Service Centre and on-line. However, Rugby's existing booking system – based around a set of spreadsheets with complex colour coding – was proving a major stumbling block.

"The system was fine while only one or two people were taking bookings," points out Chris Greer, Rugby's Parks and Cemeteries Administration Officer, "but with more and more staff requiring access, and more and more local teams using our facilities, the system was in danger of failing. We needed to allow more than one member of staff to make activity bookings at the same time, and that just wasn't possible with spreadsheets. We also wanted to meet our targets for public access to on-line booking facilities."

Rugby also realised that a new booking system could also be used to streamline booking of internal meeting rooms. The council had been handling this through a mix of paper and Microsoft Outlook-based diaries. "Staff time was being wasted with people checking a room was available, making a provisional booking, confirming the booking and often amending or canceling it," Chris admits. "We were looking for a system that would enable people to book over the council's intranet, and check room availability and confirm bookings there and then. We also wanted staff to be able to book their catering requirements and equipment such as projectors at the same time."

Chris says Rugby evaluated several solutions, but found that many of the systems on the market are aimed at large leisure centres and come with a high price tag, so they wouldn't have provided a cost-effective solution for Rugby's needs. "Toplevel BookingOffice won in terms of both price and capability," she explains. "We also liked the look and feel of Toplevel for both our own staff and the public."

BookingOffice is now being used by staff at Rugby to take bookings for holiday activities and special events. Toplevel and Capita, working in partnership, have integrated it with the Capita e-payments system used by the council. Rugby is now adding BookingOffice transactions to the council's website, to provide online booking of holiday activities for the public in time for Easter.

Getting BookingOffice up and running was straightforward, according to Chris. A small group of staff received a day's training from Toplevel, while Chris received an additional day's training in the member management module. It then took around a week to set up the first set of activity resources on BookingOffice. "BookingOffice has such wide capabilities that I kept revising the resource set up as I found that the system could cope with our more complicated requirements," she points out. "I expect to be able to add future resources much more quickly now I have experience with the system." Chris also handled training of all Customer Service Centre staff in use of BookingOffice for activity bookings herself, and will provide further staff training as each new resource comes on-line.

In the short term, Rugby will be adding internal room bookings and sports pitch bookings to the range of facilities handled by BookingOffice. In addition, the council plans to utilise the member management module to support its Leisure Pass scheme, while Chris will be using BookingOffice forms designer to extend the details collected through BookingOffice. "I expect other suitable operations to become apparent as time goes on," she adds.

And, although the system is still in its infancy, Chris says feedback from staff in Rugby's Customer Service Centre has been very positive. She concludes, "So far the software has performed as we expected and has provided the solutions that we were looking for. Apart from the price and capabilities of the product, I have been particularly impressed with the support that we have received and the willingness of Toplevel staff to take on board and implement suggestions that are made for improvements to the system. Toplevel sales and support staff seem genuinely interested in providing a product that will meet all of our needs and in developing this in accordance with our requirements."