Discover Canada Tours and A.Y. Technologies teamed up to solve some online booking challenges that were slowing them down. In a custom 3-week Roadmap Workshop, we helped them identify what was possible to upgrade and streamline their process for both customers and staff.
Using a legacy system that wasn’t tailored to their business or easily modifiable, Discover Canada Tours was tired of repeating tasks or doing things manually that should have been automated or digitized. There was a desire to make booking tours faster and easier for all their customers, and for sales and management staff as well. A.Y. Technologies was called in to help evaluate the current system and lend expertise on what solution would work best for them now and as they grow.
Discover Canada Tours offers travel tours and memorable experiences across Western Canada for both local and international audiences. They offer a variety of experiences including nature and adventure tours, city tours, skiing and snowboarding trips as well as fully customizable experiences for private groups. They take care of itinerary, transport, lodging and tour activities, with experienced, fun-loving guides to lead the way.
Step one was for us to understand how Discover Canada Tours offered their products and what a day in life looked like for them. This involved meeting with team members from sales, operations, and accounting to better understand from each perspective what was most important to their respective department. We also probed into where their frustrations were with the current system. We asked questions like, “what makes a lot of your time or creates frustration for you and others?” and “what would a perfect system be able to do for you?”. There was an emphasis on functionality and what the system would do, rather than how the system would do it.
As part of our User Experience research component, we tagged along with a sales team on location at a partner school. We saw first hand how they have fun and gather crowds, but also how the sales process was handled in action and the daily obstacles that could be improved or solved by the new booking system.
Once our team had a better understanding of all the requirements necessary for a new system, we phrased them as user-stories for development. Examples of the user-story structures are “As a customer, I want to be able to…” or “As a sales person I need to…”.
Using this story telling format, we described the entire system’s functionality. As before, we kept our focus purely on what needed to be done but not necessarily how.
Once all functionality had been determined and our user stories were written, we set out to find 3rd party software that could get us most of the way there before customization and integrations needed to be added. This process involved analyzing and comparing their features, talking with their respective sales, and support staff to see what was possible.
After the 3rd party software analysis, we put together our recommendations for the tools and methods that would be most effective. Considering Discover Canada Tour’s needs now and in the future, our recommendation considered factors like customizability and flexibility, while remaining as cost-effective as possible.
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