Featured Quote:
“Before [switching], we used to spend a lot of time guiding people on how to use our online experience. If anyone has issues, I’m the one who deals with their complaints and help them – and I used to get a lot of complaints with [our previous software]. I don’t get those complaints anymore.” - Andre Walker - City of Pearland, Texas
Their Solution
The City of Pearland began their search for a technology solution that addressed the ongoing software challenges they were facing and would also help support their operations' growth.
"Recognizing the need for a tailored approach, we conducted a comprehensive internal evaluation with our finance team, contract team, and other key stakeholders. We implemented a rigorous and in-depth scoring process to ensure due diligence and maintain transparency. Throughout this process, we sought to engage multiple potential vendors and gather extensive feedback, ensuring that our decision was made in the best interest of the city and its residents.”
As part of their in-depth explorations, they wanted to ensure their next software partner would provide:
- Streamlined, easy-to-use software for their staff members
- A modern and intuitive self-service experience for their community members across all devices
- A custom-branded mobile app to engage members directly from their smartphones
- Powerful, accurate, and easy-to-generate reporting functionality
- More robust and comprehensive facility booking capabilities
- Responsive and effective customer support services
In evaluating their options for a new recreation management software partner, Xplor Recreation stood out from the outset, but they continued their thorough investigation to ensure fairness to the 3 other vendors and that they were checking all the boxes when it came to doing their due diligence.
"We had a strong feeling we’d pick you even before we went through our evaluation process, but it’s a big decision and we wanted to be sure we did our due diligence and made it fair for all our potential partners"
Ultimately, their intuition proved correct, as Xplor Recreation emerged as the clear winner at the end of their extensive evaluation process.
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Their Results
By switching to Xplor Recreation, the City of Pearland team has been able to address all the challenges they were facing with their previous provider, significantly improve their staff and customer experience, and accelerate their COVID19 revenue recovery.
Key Benefits Experienced:
Accelerated Revenue Recovery:
After experiencing a significant loss of members due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, the City of Pearland has rebounded and is meeting revenue expectations for memberships. Andre credits Xplor Recreation’s user-friendly platform for playing a big part in helping them bounce back from the pandemic.
"Like everyone else, we got hit very hard by the pandemic and lost a huge group of our members at the time. It took us a very long time to finally start meeting our revenue expectations. Xplor Recreation has been a massive help in making this possible because it makes it so much easier for our community members to engage with our offerings.”
Improved Customer Experience:
Xplor Recreation's modern and intuitive self-service experience improved the overall customer experience for Pearland's community members – helping the Pearland team achieve its goals of providing a best-in-class user experience for its customers. The online registration experience has also helped significantly reduce the time Andre spends helping customers overcome their self-serve challenges and frustrations.
"One of the things we love most about Xplor Recreation is the online experience. It’s much more modern and easier to use, and we really like the fact that we can embed the online portal directly onto our site for a seamless user experience.
Before [switching], we used to spend a lot of time guiding people on how to use our online portal. If anyone has issues, I’m the one who deals with their complaints and helps them – and I used to get a lot of complaints with [our previous software]. I don’t get those complaints anymore. From time to time, some members of our active adult community reach out for assistance, particularly those who are new to using their cell phones for various tasks. To address these requests, I've developed video guides that have proven to be very effective in helping them navigate these scenarios."
Accurate, Fast, and Easy-to-Generate Reporting:
The City of Pearland faced a lot of challenges when it came to their previous platform’s reporting capabilities. Since switching to Xplor Recreation, they’ve been able to save significant amounts of time producing reports and can rest easy knowing that the data is accurate.
The City of Pearland experienced an organizational shift as they were able to significantly reduce report generation time from 2 to 3 days to just 5 to 10 minutes by using Xplor Recreation’s frictionless software. This improvement allows for quicker reimbursement submissions and more efficient reporting on member usage for programs like Renew Active.
“Being able to easily create custom reports for whatever we need is a big win for us. An example of this I can share is that we partner with a program that requires us to produce utilization reports on a regular basis. It used to take our staff about 2 to 3 days to get the info they needed out of our system and over to the partner platform.
Since moving to Xplor Recreation, I can get that same report in about 5 minutes instead of multiple days. I actually wrote a memo to our leadership team about this. This is one of the biggest benefits for me personally, because at any given time I could get a request from council about a report they need ‘yesterday’ and I can easily spin up what they need.”
Responsive and Effective Customer Support:
Since switching to Xplor Recreation, Andre and the Pearland team can rest easy knowing that they’ll get quick and effective responses to their customer support inquiries, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Monthly calls with the account management team allow Pearland to stay in the know on how to maximize the platform's utility and adopt new functionality. This proactive approach ensures that Pearland remains informed about the software's capabilities and can leverage them effectively to support their growth.
“Overall, I’m much happier with the customer support I get from Xplor Recreation than [our previous vendor]. Over the years, I've developed some great relationships with the support staff. They remember and we’ve been able to establish a rapport. All of the staff do a good job of communicating updates on support cases.
The account management team members that I’ve worked with have all been extremely helpful. Alyssa and Cassandra left a great impression on us. The account managers I’ve worked with have always been responsive and provide solutions, unlike [our previous software provider]."
Intuitive Facility Booking Features:
Xplor Recreation's software allows Pearland to implement a safety mechanism by enabling community members to tentatively book facilities without making a payment upfront. This feature reduces the risk of booking errors, minimizes the time spent by the Pearland team managing incorrect bookings, and provides their community members with a better customer experience.
“The facility booking functionality is a game changer for us. Now we can allow community members to tentatively book a facility without paying upfront. We used to have to spend a ton of time dealing with facilities that were booked incorrectly.
Another thing that's huge for us is the fact that you can automatically send contracts for signature and have them stored on the customer’s account. It’s way better experience for both our customers and staff.”
Improved Operational Efficiencies:
Xplor Recreation's user-friendly interface allowed the City of Pearland team to easily manage the software transition by ridding them of cumbersome and manual processes they had to deal with in their previous platform. It’s also helped them streamline their internal processes and unlock operational efficiencies - allowing them to focus on what’s most important to them: their community members.
“[Xplor recreation]’s been so much more efficient for our staff and it’s much easier to use. Our staff is able to take advantage of more features which has helped us be more effective in gaining members and retaining them. It's been really easy for our staff to learn, and the self-guided training system has been really helpful for onboarding new staff.
Overall, it’s much easier to manage our community members’ accounts because everything is system-generated. We don’t have to constantly go through cumbersome, manual processes like we did with [our previous software]. The software has even helped us to change and make improvements to some of our business practices and procedures - allowing us to really focus on providing a better customer experience.”
Better Software at a Fraction of the Cost
Enjoying rich features doesn’t mean a hefty price tag thanks to Xplor Recreation. With its affordable and budget-friendly pricing, the City of Pearland now uses world-class recreation management software without breaking the bank. This capability marks a significant departure from their previous vendor, which would’ve charged them a premium for inferior functionality.
“We’re saving a lot of money overall now that we are using Xplor Recreation and we’re getting features we’d have to pay add-on fees for with [our previous software]. The merchant fees were really high too, so we’ve saved a lot of money there as well. Now that we’ve switched to Xplor Pay, we’re saving even more on our processing fees.”
As our conversation was coming to an end, we asked Andre if he would recommend Xplor Recreation to other parks and recreation agencies – his response?
“Absolutely.”
