The team at Kew were particularly keen on the ability to access Priava Cloud from almost any location with access to the Internet from PCs at both locations and, indeed, from laptops out and about and from home. Rachael Proudlock, Event Sales Coordinator at RBG, Kew commented, “this provides us with greater flexibility for all members of our team and, ultimately, a more responsive service to our clients.” The team look forward to even greater flexibility using other types of mobile devices in the future.

The events team manages around 400 separate events per year with the summer months hitting over 40 events, each with up to 230 guests dependent on the type of event and venue. With the goal of ensuring the highest quality of services available to their clients, the Kew team manage almost 30 approved suppliers from catering to lighting & sound production services to AV to music & entertainment to floristry and photography. Details of all current suppliers are maintained within the Priava Cloud system and records are kept of chosen suppliers by event with custom reports produced to ensure all involved with an event are fully informed and prepared.

Long term support is extremely important to the events team and Priava’s commitment to its cloud-based system and its approach to continual improvement of features and functions proved a key consideration in Kew’s decision to move to Priava Cloud. For the team, a particularly beneficial aspect of Priava Cloud over the previous on-premise system is that upgrades to the system become transparent as far as everyday business is concerned. Rachael comments “Previously we had to wait for upgrades until the in-house IT team could fit us within their schedule to upgrade software or server hardware. Now software changes happen instantaneously as far as we are concerned and we are completely unaware of the hardware now.” Nevertheless, RBG, Kew’s IT team did work closely with Priava prior to going live with the cloud-based system to ensure on-going reliability and security. According to Rachael, “our in-house IT team are very happy with Priava and quite intrigued as to its use of advanced cloud-based technology”. Only maintenance of the event team’s Internet browsers is an on-going responsibility of the IT team and availability of access to the Internet. On the very few occasions where there has been interruption to the Internet access service, the inherent flexibility of Priava is such that, if necessary, the team can always work from alternate locations thereby strictly limiting the effect of any communications outage on Kew’s events business and its clients. “Hot desking facilities within the Gardens can help us too”, says Rachael.

Internet availability aside, the reliability of Priava Cloud has been perfect from the Kew team’s experience. “Availability has been great so far” says Rachael.

Transition from Events Perfect to Priava Cloud was planned to take place over a one week period including the time to prepare the original database for upload into the new system. This went smoothly and Kew’s team were up and running without any real hitch. Priava’s UK people were on hand to provide support every step of the way. “They were very helpful” says Rachael, “It always takes a little time to get up to speed with a new system and to understand precisely how it works,but the transition was pretty simple from our point of view.”

Features of the new system that have been particularly useful for Kew’s events team include block booking of regular clients over the year. The team use this feature to save significant time and effort entering repeat events into the diary. Team members can then modify individual bookings for special requirements as necessary, producing detailed reports for clients and internal use, quickly and easily.

Additionally, the advanced reporting facility within Priava Cloud has been somewhat of a revelation for Rachael and her team. “The reports function has been a really nice surprise for us and is far more flexible than we were expecting”, admits Rachael. “We can now design, create and change tailor made reports with just occasional help from Priava.” Rachael adds that “Monthly financial reports are now tailored to provide information in the way best suited to our central finance department and itemised by date, venue, event, etc.”

Kew’s events team have also found the multi- tasking feature of Priava Cloud extremely useful. Rachael explains that “We are on the phone a lot of the time and multiple tabs across the top of the screen save us a lot of time jumping in and out of different parts of the system to take calls and make bookings, etc. It is also quicker for our clients too. In our previous single task system we had to close down what we were doing every time we took a booking.”

The fact that the events team can store every piece of information associated with a client in one place is a powerful facility for them. As Rachael puts it “We can dip in and out at any time. We put everything in the system so that all correspondence including emails, summaries of telephone calls, suppliers’ details, reports, etc. relevant to a client are all linked together. This instils confidence in our clients so that, when they call in, regardless of who they speak to, all their history with us is immediately available so that they don’t have to repeat everything all the time.”