Event Technology Onboarding Roadmap: How Bently Reserve Experienced a 4X ROI with AllSeated


The Bently Reserve is an iconic venue located in the Financial District of San Francisco. The building was well-known as the main headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for nearly sixty years.

As a reimagined rental venue for special events, business meetings and conferences, the Bently Reserve’s internal sales, marketing, and operations teams faced all-too-familiar challenges:

  • Struggled to provide clients with multiple visual representations of the space for their event
  • Faced difficulties managing real-time diagrammatic communication on day-of-event
  • Grappled with ways to easily involve clients in the planning process
  • Spent too much time on day-to-day operational tasks

Within one year of onboarding with AllSeated’s 360 and VR visualization platform, the Bently Reserve achieved big results:

  • 30% reduction in labor overtime costs
  • 15% increase in on-site sales conversions per month
  • A whopping 4X ROI increase over one year

Are you thinking about implementing 360 and VR visualization to drive sky-high ROI and results like the Bently Reserve? Consider the following best practices and strategies to ensure a successful onboarding of event technology.

Understand Current Processes and Needs

Before diving headfirst into a new solution, take time to identify gaps between current processes and needs to determine what needs to be changed.

For the Bently Reserve, closing the gap on back-end communications and providing clients with an immersive view of events in the space was at the top of the list of desired improvements.

When thinking about current processes, remember to look at it from both the external client and internal team views. After all, if something isn’t working quite right for the catering department, there’s a good chance that pain point will spill over to the end client too.

Identify Goals and Areas for Improvement

For any successful event tech implementation and onboarding, involve decision-makers across the entire venue—from sales and marketing teams to all the operation teams. Work together to identify and agree on top goals.

In the case of the Bently Reserve, the team set the following specific goals:

  • Achieve higher conversion rates among prospective clients
  • Close the communication gap for day-of coordination and labor
  • Maximize customer experience by empowering involvement from Day 1

Ask for Advice on Best Practices

It’s good to know what others are doing to market their venue to event organizers and planners.

During the onboarding process, work with your team to identify industry best practices and how to apply those ideas to your specific goals and objectives. As we work with tens of thousands of venues, event professionals, caterers and other vendors worldwide, the AllSeated team has unique insight on the latest trends and tools and is happy to share our advice!

Establish Your Timeline

Use these milestones to plan your event technology timeline accordingly:

  • Submit basic room dimensions. We’ll map the template for you to-scale so you can immediately get started using those.
  • Schedule a time for full room scans. Rooms being scanned need to be bare, so find an available time in your calendar that allows for several hours to multiple days for scanning (depending on the size of the space).
  • Allow for 360 development time. Once your room scan has been scheduled, AllSeated will provide an estimate for how long it takes to completely render all the unique features and details in each of your spaces.
  • Include time for website updates and rollout of the VR version. Once the room is fully built-in 360, the AllSeated team also creates a widget to add to your website. If you’re also rolling out the floorplans in VR, don’t forget to allow additional production time for that version too.

Ready, Set, Launch!

As the initial 2D plans to full 360 and immersive VR visualization tools are finalized, keep all relevant team members in the loop about their availability so they put them to use.

 As your team starts using the visualization tools, start tracking data around those goals you set at the beginning to measure increases in efficiency, sales conversions or ROI.

If you are interested in learning more about how AllSeated can help deliver higher revenue and ROI as the Bently Reserve experienced, please feel free to contact us for a demo!

Of Possible Interest:

Bently Reserve VR Spotlight