VisitScotland's newly appointed Meetings and Incentive Manager Neil Brownlee managed the implementation and roll-out of Velvet's Chaser BUREAU system across VisitScotland's organisation, which has bases in multiple locations across the UK in addition to their international sales offices
Based at Ocean Point One, Edinburgh's recently developed dockside development is also home to the offices of the Scottish Parliament, a new shopping complex and is also the home of the Royal Yacht Britannia. VisitScotland chose to implement Chaser as a hosted solution within the organsiation to enable access to the system from any location.
Headed by Caroline Packman, the Business Tourism Unit (BTU) is tasked with generating business for all regions across Scotland both at home and Internationally. They have dedicated marketing and association contacts for each of the Scottish regions in addition to key areas of the business tourism sector including, London, North America and Europe.
VisitScotalnd's Moira Unwin and Caroline Smith are not strangers to Chaser. Prior to the reorganisation of VisitScotland's marketing strategy, Moira and Caroline used Chaser at an individual destination level to handle enquiries. Now representing key regions, Moira had direct responsibility for the collation and organisation of all of VisitScotland's key business data and contacts. "It's going to be great having all of our product data and clients in one place!", said Moira.
Chaser is acting as a CRM for all business generated leads in addition to marketing and campaigns carried out by the BTU. Velvet's Tim Clark provided on-site consultancy, guidance and initial user training to each of the BTUs sixteen team members. "It's great working with Neil, Claire-Jayne and the other team members at Ocean Point", said Tim. "Having Moira directly involved with the implementation and set-up has been excellent - her knowledge of Chaser from a destination perspective has really helped with the setting-up of the system across the whole organisation which while not dis-similar is a whole new challenge".
Chaser BUREAU is used by around fifty individual UK destinations - implementing across a whole region and to work for users based both nationally and Internationally has enabled VisitScotland to pool their collective product and client data knowledge. All members of the team whether based at Ocean Point One North America, Europe or at a trade exhibition have direct access to live, up-to-date product and client knowledge with the capability of generating enquiries direct to partner destinations and venues.
Velvet and VisitScotland are currently working on integrating their new web site that will feature up-to-date product data driven by Chaser's WEB module, including venue search, product details, enquiry and brochure request forms. "VisitScotland have chosen an innovative, new approach to taking the data maintained by Chaser and presenting it to consumers", said Tim. "The new exciting site will 'talk' directly with the Chaser WEB module using Chaser as it's source for content and passing enquiries directly to Chaser for handling by the appropriate team member".
We wish Neil and his team every success with Chaser and look forward to working closely with them in providing on-line services in addition to enhancing their service offering.
An ideal working environment - the VisitScotland offices at Ocean Point in Edinburgh are a stones-throw from the original MalMaison Hotel, Tower Place, Leith, which overlooks the stunning harbour side and is adjacent to an excellent selection of restaurants, cafes and traditional pubs housed in developments of warehouse conversions, traditional buildings and modern apartment blocks (pictured above).
