We had a great time once we were on the wall, my kids loved the thrill and challenge of climbing and it’s something you can get stuck into as a family and all genuinely challenge yourselves individually rather than just going through the motions.
However, the consumer journey getting from website to wall was a User Experience disaster zone. It was frustrating, intimidating, confusing and enormously time-consuming. If I were not curious enough to want to push through and get to the end (it is my day job, after all!), I would have given up and taken the kids swimming instead.
We live in a competitive world. There are around 50 climbing gyms in London alone and growing all the time. Gaining attention of potential customers is already hard enough and yet operators are having to put up with business management platforms that present their hard-won website visitors with, frankly, abysmal customer journeys.
For the operators themselves, these same platforms offer dreadful usability and functionality for staff and management. Ugly UX, clunky, poor reporting, local servers with limited or no cloud functionality, unfit POS, poor integrations, no or insufficient inbuilt waiver functionality, limited or no customer portal functionality – that’s just the start! The list of shortcomings is long and comprehensive.
They are overwhelmingly systems that were designed many years ago and which have barely evolved since the mid 2010’s after changes in ownership and a lack of investment.
And these issues aren’t simply minor wrinkles. The appalling front end experience costs operators money due to high failure rates to complete sign-ups, for example. Take my experience with my two sons. I was taken to a website dead-end. Three times. I wasn’t sure if I’d done something wrong, if I needed to click ‘back’ or refresh the page. Once I’d pre-registered, I wasn’t sure whether I could then book. And I was suddenly on someone else’s website, not the website of the operator.
All of this creates opportunity for the customer to be lost: operators, these shortcomings lose you business.
They are just not fit for purpose for today’s world. Why do climbing centres put up with it? There is only one reason: lack of a better option!
Clava exists to solve these problems. We aim to make your customer’s journey smooth and seamless. We aim to make your life as an operator as easy as possible as we understand it’s hard enough to run your business anyway, the last thing you need to be worrying about is a poor business management platform.
