What a year it’s been…It may not have been the Christmas we expected, but we sure had a lot of fun watching Bridgerton (yes, you did), debating which Quality Street is the best (green triangle every time 😌) and deciding whether or not to put bread sauce on your turkey sandwich (the answer is yes).
We turn our attention to what is promising to be an exciting 2021 with news of the UK-EU trade deal and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine going into circulation.
But before we start looking too far ahead it’s important to take stock and look back on what has been achieved by the HeadBox team, with a particular focus on the leaps and bounds made by the Product & Tech team in 2020.
Going completely in-house 🏡
We began the year getting rid of the old, and welcoming in the new. We moved away from extendi, and decommissioned the entire STACK infrastructure which meant all enquiries now went through the same consolidated flow.
Building the Brief Builder 👷♀️
This included updating the direct enquiry process to use Brief Builder, and building our hosts a new experience to manage all their leads, alongside a new experience for both guests and hosts to interact with each other.
Matches becomes Lead Feed 💚
This allowed us to pick up speed with Lead Feed as we looked to grow to over 100 weekly active users. But engaged hosts needed a simple way to list and so we rebuilt the listing process, reducing time to list by 90% – we actually now have hosts list their own spaces!
To infinity and beyond ⚡️
In parallel, and with less marketing resources available, we automated the creation of landing pages with almost 2000 pages now generated on demand based on location and event type. Once traffic returns, this will drive lots more traffic to HeadBox.
Did someone say automate? 🕹
We also heard the beating drum over the need to automate meeting rooms and private dining, but first, we needed to get guests actually using Brief Builder and importantly, ensuring we captured all required data, removing the need for any qualification calls to take place for these events.
Roll Up, Sign Up… 🖋
We also simplified the onboarding process for all of our guests, making sign-up a part of the Brief Builder, and we introduced domain triaging to automatically recognise if you are a Business Guest. For these guests, they now just have to send us their brief and it will make sure it ends up in the correct place. Far simpler, and a much better Business experience. This also made the on-boarding of Business guests far quicker.
The Brief Builder goes Virtual 👨💻
With the rise of virtual, we modified the homepage to make it clearer, and introduced virtual into Brief Builder too so we can track (and report) on everything from a single place.
G’day mate, we’re heading Down Under 🦘🇦🇺
For Australia – an updated host listing process, lots of behind the scenes data security changes for ISO were made, and Lead Feed and Digital Proposals were made international ready, plus geolocation on the website too.
Virtual Event Expert for Private Dining 🧠
And last but by no means least, meeting room and private dining automation. We now have a new way for hosts to build proposals, we have VEE giving recommendations from Brief Builder to invite those hosts, and a new experience for Business guests to respond – all built on a new scalable infrastructure.
