Freedom Boat Club delivers a unique hassle free recreational boating experience for its members

Continually expanding

In May of 2019, Freedom Boat Club was acquired by Brunswick Corporation. A leader in the marine space, Brunswick’s portfolio includes Mercury Marine engines along with boat brands including Bayliner Boats, Boston Whaler, Cypress Cay Pontoon Boats, and Sea Ray among several others. While the original mission has fundamentally remained the same, the composition and scope of Freedom Boat Club is continually expanding.

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Scheduling challenge

Caroline Bugg, Digital Product Director at Freedom Boat Club explains the challenge connected to the expansion; “With the expansion of the Freedom Boat Club came the desire to further strengthen the digital backbone the organisation was running on. The new solution should be able to run at scale, handle large spikes of reservations with seasonal demand, work in Salesforce and provide a secure digital environment, But above all, the organisation has always valued a quality customer experience and needed a system to fully support this package of demands.” A key element in delivering a hassle-free recreational boating experience is easy scheduling. Everyone who joins the Club enjoys unlimited access to the Home Club fleet and most memberships allow for reciprocal reservations at the other clubs globally. Reservations are made using a proprietary, member-friendly online reservation system with GoMeddo and Salesforce at the core in the backend. 

Numbers on scheduling

The amount of reservations at Freedom Boat Club going through GoMeddo is impressive. On a yearly basis around 550.000 reservations are made, On any day the system handles 2.000 to 2.500 reservations. On busy weekends the number can go up to 5.000 reservations per day, with big spikes at specific times of the day when people think about going boating for the day. Because of the large and varied fleet Freedom Boat Club operates, together with the ability to book extra services like a trainer on board, any reservation is a multi dimensional scheduling request which GoMeddo handles.

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Every customer counts

Big numbers in reservations also mean big numbers in customers. Freedom Boat Club happily serves up to 90.000 customers around the world. It’s important for the organisation to keep track of individual customers and their activities. The benefit for Freedom Boat club is that GoMeddo is a native Salesforce application, this means all data is directly stored in Salesforce and available for creating insights in customers segments but also individual customers, which can be used to re-engage and further improve customer experience and drive business growth both within the Freedom Boat Club and the parent Brunswick Corporation.

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Results throughout the value chain

“The benefit of the implementation of the platform with GoMeddo as the scheduling engine is expected to lead to a faster conversion from prospect-to-customer when the system is extended to prospective customers and is also visible in the reservations numbers, which have gone up by an impressive 25% since the implementation of the new system. The larger number of reservations mean the connection with individual customers is growing with all additional benefits connected.” More reservations generate an increase in additional services which people order together with their reservation. As a consequence this delivers Freedom Boat Club more customer, fleet and product/service data, which is used to continuously improve the offering and customer experience. Since Freedom Boat Club is part of the Brunswick Group, when customers want to switch from, for example, reserving a boat through their membership to buying a boat, the existing customer data including reservations can be used to make a better tailored offering. Last but not least the new platform lets Freedom Boat Club improve analytics and operational processes more efficiently improving the staff experience and business decisions which in turn further supports improving the member experience.

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Security next to scalability

With the ever growing customer base, the importance of having a solid and secure digital operation never becomes less. Freedom Boat Club used a custom built planning system in the past. The old system wasn’t scalable, and it was going down on really high transactional days. It also left the organisation more vulnerable because development of the system wasn’t keeping pace with technological innovations. When choosing to work with GoMeddo, security also was a big topic. As a native Salesforce booking application GoMeddo passed a strict Salesforce security review that tests the security posture of the solution. There is no data transfer of customer data between systems, because all data is stored in the Salesforce environment of Freedom Boat Club and only accessible for them. “We value customer privacy, although we are a US-based company we wanted to comply with the even stricter European GDPR regulations concerning customer data storage. Since GoMeddo is a Europe based application (The Netherlands) they also follow the strict GDPR regulations.” 

Future developments

As a global market leader the Freedom Boat Club is never done with innovating. With a new generation of customers coming to the docks, improving the user experience on mobile phones becomes increasingly important. With GoMeddo the Freedom Boat Club has the possibility to connect scheduling elements to any user experience portal or application. Further improving the customer experience isn’t only about digital innovation, it’s also about adding extra services to reservations, giving customers the ability to customise their booking and grow the business of Freedom Boat Club as a consequence. GoMeddo is the scheduling solution to handle all these challenges, helping to provide freedom to individual experiences for the customers of Freedom Boat Club.

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Collaboration and partnership between Freedom Boat Club and Gomeddo

“As a larger organisation with also a strong growth ambition, It’s important to have a good collaboration with our digital tech partners. GoMeddo really delivers on this, with a quick reaction time to specific needs for Freedom Boat Club. Adjustments in the system were rapidly deployed and in good alignment, based on the use case we provided. The very intuitive usage of GoMeddo in Salesforce makes it easy for our team to work with. The additional benefit we experience is that it’s easy to connect to any user interface and deliver end-to-end integration which is important for the focus on customer experience.

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Do you want to know more about Freedom Boat Club or want to try boating with them yourself? Please visit www.freedomboatclub.com/ for more information.

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Do you want to share your scheduling challenge with us? Please let us know via the contact form or visit the Salesforce Appexchange.

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