Missing Pieces Escape Games’ launches as Wherewolf’s first integration with Bookeo.
Last month Wherewolf had been schmoozing at the Room Escape Conference & Tour in Nashville, loving all things Escape Room! So we thought this was an excellent time to tell you all about our new Escape Room client Missing Pieces Escape Games: Minneapolis, who will be our first client to launch with the new Bookeo integration.
With 100% 5 star reviews on TripAdvisor, Yelp, Facebook and Google, Missing Pieces are excelling in offering a fantastic customer experience. Their reviews describe how “awesome” their staff are, how “welcoming” the facility is and how “enjoyable” the puzzles are, it’s clear to see why they’re the top ranked Escape Room in Minnesota.
So we thought we’d pop by to check it out for ourselves and speak to one of the owner’s Matt Steinman about his experience launching with Wherewolf.
Missing Pieces is a family run business. Matt, along with his three siblings; Michael, Anthony and Alexius, and parents Dave and Sheryl started the company in January 2016 and opened in November 2016. To date they have added a new room every six months (Diamond Dilemma, Ruin Raidersand Cuckoo’s Clock), and are currently working on their fourth new room.
When asked what made them decide to open an Escape Room, Matt said “…my family, we’ve always been gamers; board games, card games, dice games, video games, everything…” and then after playing an Escape Room as a family one year, “…we realised, we could do this” and then that Christmas of 2015, “my mum built a makeshift Escape Room in the basement of her house, and the month after…that was it, we started our Escape Room.” With backgrounds in engineering and robotics, and a family passion for all things gaming it seems like fate that the Steinman family should start their own Escape Room adventure.
Missing Pieces have been using Bookeo as their reservation system since launch. Prior to Wherewolf they didn’t have a check-in process, but had a waiver on the website that was emailed to the client before visiting. If they filled out the waiver ahead of time then they wouldn’t need to do anything once they arrived. However, as Matt said, “the old waiver didn’t collect a ton of information, and not in a usable format” which limited the data they had to gain marketing insights from.
As we all know, marketing is key in growing profits, so the more data you can analyse, the more knowledge you have on your users to help direct your marketing efforts. Before Wherewolf, Matt experimented with Mailchimp follow up emails once a client had left – “we’ve tested a few different things; one every week, then one every other week, then once a month, just to see how many people unsubscribe with different frequencies.” But other than this, there wasn’t any other data to work with in terms of seeing user trends.
With Matt’s background in business management and analytics, the great benefit to launching with Wherewolf “is the amount of data that we can collect, easier, and in a really clean format that is is accessible and usable.” Metrics such as what kind of group booking visited, “allows us to find out what percentage of our business is related to corporate bookings, versus birthday parties, and then we can work that back in to our marketing.” Which means the extra client data gathered through Wherewolf can help optimise their marketing efforts, and they already have ideas on how to use that data.
Not only is the data going to help optimise internal workflow, but the new app will help grow the already fantastic customer offering that Missing Pieces provide. As Matt says, “customer experience is really important to us” so the “ease of use of the app is very apparent – the functionality and the interactions, big tiles, big icons, simple clicks” will make the check in process much easier, “you’re not trying to click into a little field and then bring up the keyboard and try to type, then have to make corrections…it definitely used to give some of our customers issues.” Our “three clicks to check in” process get clients into the game faster, and without frustration.
Bookeo is the final puzzle piece (excuse the pun) in offering a seamless customer experience. “Those two are the big drivers that lead back to offering a great customer experience from start to finish. From the minute they walk through the door, we want it to be really good, so this is all part of stepping our game up. We’re excited to see how the integration with Bookeo will go, and having all the customer names and information all filled in and that should make it that little bit easier”.
You can see the new waiver process Missing Pieces now uses below, demonstrating exactly how Wherewolf integrates with Bookeo.
We’ll check back in with Matt and his family in a few months and see how the data they’ve been able to gather has helped grow their bookings. Until then, I hope you enjoy this photo of me playing the Diamond Dilemma escape room!
