Automated Seminar Management with Podio and Xing Events
Kommunikationslotsen from Cologne are among the most established providers of facilitation and visual facilitation training in Europe — together with their bikablo® akademie. Fast growth meant their booking process had to become leaner, automated and scalable.
The Challenge: Limited Seats, Overlapping Decisions
The full process — enquiry, reservation, booking, confirmation, payment, cancellation and attendance — caused high process costs. Excel sheets, loosely defined steps and a lot of knowledge in people’s heads made it hard to scale.
Up to a hundred events a year, many running in parallel and with up to 30 participants each, had to be managed by a team of three at two locations. Questions like “Is there still a seat left in seminar xyz?” needed to disappear: Podio had to show the current state of every enquiry, reservation and booking — anytime, also on mobile.
The Solution: An Agile Rollout During Live Operations
Training, implementation, data migration, feedback and improvements followed each other in short cycles without disrupting day-to-day business. Kollaborateure migrated several thousand customer records, built a scalable enquiry, reservation and booking process, and set up a seminar pool covering every status from planned to fully booked.
The active seminar programme is published automatically from Podio to several public WordPress websites. Finally, Kollaborateure defined the requirements for a new Zapier integration together with the Xing Events team in Munich — and Kommunikationslotsen were the first customer to use it, bringing booking data into Podio in real time.
One System That Grows With Them
Today Podio covers everything from planning the seminar portfolio, through the commercial process (with Xing Events), to internal administration, reports and the dispatch of external visual facilitators working all over Europe.
Replaced
Excel sheetsManual booking emailsIntegrations
Xing EventsZapierWordPress pluginThe Outcome
Real-time bookings
Bookings from Xing Events arrive in Podio automatically.
Several thousand records
The full customer base was migrated into Podio.
Automatic publishing
The current seminar programme appears on several websites without manual work.
Ready to scale
A small team can handle a growing number of seminars.