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The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) is an internationally recognised professional body with offices across the UK and regional offices in almost every continent on the globe. Meetings and events are a hugely important part of their business. But before working with us, every part of the organisation was making its own ad-hoc arrangements with hundreds of different suppliers. Our challenge was to prove that one single supplier could provide the structured, efficient approach RICS desperately needed.
Step one was to assign a dedicated Account Manager and team of specialist Meeting and Event Consultants. RICS has five main divisions that operate like independent businesses. Over six months, our team held face-to-face meetings with 30 key stakeholders, including bookers, finance and procurement people, so we could understand exactly what each division required, how they worked, and how that tied into RICS as a whole.
A made-to-measure response
We used this information to create bespoke organisation-wide booking processes, strategies and metrics, and negotiated a rate programme with preferred suppliers and meeting venues.
We also established a Service Level Agreement that set out agreed times for responding to venue booking enquiries, providing management information and issuing invoices.
The level of compliance with the new service arrangements was very high from the start. In the first six months, our team received 1,100 enquiries and booked 647 venues.
An optimised, effortless experience
By creating a single, centralised process for checking and signing off venue contracts, we helped RICS mitigate risk and track what every part of the business was doing. And with everyone on the same page, we could react and respond to any issue as soon as it arose.
As well as making all of the bookings and other arrangements for the professional bodies meetings and events, we also settle the bills with the venues and service providers directly. So RICS went from having hundreds of suppliers to pay and manage, to a single, reliable one.
By taking care of the detail and taking time to really understand our client’s needs, we proved our single-supplier approach made sense. We backed this up with tangible results: our booking and payment processes delivered undeniable cost-effective benefits in a very short time.