The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust (A1SLT) is a charitable organisation who are responsible for building and operating brand new steam locomotives that operate on the UK network and enable people to experience a nostalgic trip through history.

With a keen focus on engineering and heritage skills they have currently built and operate two steam trains with work now focussing on their third locomotive.

The Brief

A1SLT were looking to develop a new website and a back office CRM system to secure donations across the 3 locomotives and allowing users to easily book on to tours.

The website and the CRM needed to be easily managed and edited by the team with the new CRM system aiming to streamline the way that the tours were managed.

What We Did

We designed and built a new website, and site structure, and provided in-depth training program so that the team could confidently manage the content on the website and the CRM.

For the rail tours we built a feature specifically within the CRM that allowed seats to be auto assigned reducing the amount of manual work that goes into managing that part of the organisation. We also made improvements to the customer data imports and the online booking process.

The Outcome.

The auto assign feature in the CRM has enabled the tour manager to populate carriages using an algorithm to fill the carriages in the most efficient way and produce a seating chart that can then be used by staff on the train to ensure guests have the best experience. The CRM import process also now has a 91% match rate as opposed to the 72% rate that they previously had.

“I have been working with Scarlett on the redesign of our company website and CRM system. One of my core responsibilities as a Railtours Manager is to create a seating plan for each of our trains. This has always been something which has been incredibly time consuming and tedious, with the slightest error causing problems with ticketing further down the line. When discussing this with Scarlett, we went over the possibilities of having the new CRM system being able to generate this for me and therefore saving a lot of time. At first, this seemed to be something which sounded too good to be true.

A few weeks later, whilst meeting with Scarlett, she gave me a demonstration of where she was up to with the seat allocation function within our new system. It was like all of my dreams had come true! Scarlett had carefully listened to what I had said and has developed a function which I could have only wished for. The impact of having this function is tremendous, it will be much more cost effective and will allow me to dedicate more time to other aspects of the tours.”

Lauren George - Railtours Manager