Wotton House | Cvent Event Diagramming
How Cvent Event Diagramming helped Wotton House save time and impress clients.
Near Dorking, Surrey sits Wotton House, a four-star country hotel and wedding venue with a rich history, spanning just over 400 years. John Evelyn, the first owner of the property, was a keen botanist, arboriculturist and a lover of Italian Renaissance gardens. His handiwork, in the form of an Italian garden, temple, parterre garden, and Italian fountain, can still be enjoyed today.
With 127 bedrooms, 20 flexible meeting rooms, and Grade II listed gardens, the venue is a no-brainer for event planners and couples who want to add a little countryside tranquillity to their events. Wotton House is situated conveniently between Heathrow and Gatwick airports, and is just 40 minutes away from London Waterloo, making it rural, but accessible.
With so many events and spaces of varying shapes and sizes, the sales team at Wotton House needed a way to simplify room diagramming.
The challenges of room diagramming
Jennifer Irwin, Commercial Director at Wotton House, explained that in the past, room diagramming was a long and arduous process. This was mainly caused by tools that were not created for the purpose of room diagramming. “The main challenge I faced with room diagramming was the time it would take. The team and I used to use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, where it would take forever to put together shapes and notes. It was so time-consuming and fiddly.” She explains that her team would spend hours creating, editing, and changing diagrams completely which added time that they were already short on.
Changes and back and forth with the client made the process even more difficult. “Then we’d have to go back and edit, which just takes so much time. The tools we used were not user-friendly, at all, for this purpose. Therefore, we switched to Cvent Event Diagramming.”
The solution: Cvent Event Diagramming
In 2020, Jen and her team implemented Cvent Event Diagramming which helps users design floor plans, show off event spaces in realistic 3D, and collaborate in real-time with event planners. One of the main reasons for this, Jen explains, was to save her team time. “I wanted to save hours within our team and make us more efficient. When facing clients or brides and grooms, it’s so important that our diagrams look clean and professional, which is why Cvent Event Diagramming has made such a difference.”
“The thing I like best about the tool is actually two things! One of them is how quickly we can put a diagram together. The second is if you do need to go back to that floor plan once you’ve sent it to an internal or external customer, it’s super-fast and easy to make changes.”
While saving time is a key feature of the tool, Jen and her team were also impressed by the abilities of the software. “There are these extra touches the tool provides when you’re setting up a diagram, which we love. Clients have commented on the little martini glasses we can place on the bar. Or, for example, we have a tree in the middle of our dining room, which we can include in a diagram to show an accurate representation of our space.” These are the details, Jen says, which make a difference to their relationships with event planners and couples alike.
The benefits: from hours to minutes
According to Jen, Cvent Event Diagramming has had a huge impact on the way her team works and the feedback they get from their clients. “For the past two years, it’s honestly just changed the efficiency of the team. It makes me feel so happy because now they can use their hours working on something a little more pressing.”
The relationship between the sales and operations teams, Jen says, has also been improved since using the software. “It’s made the operations team a lot more confident to deliver the correct set-up. They don’t often have any questions for the sales team when it comes to setting up an event.”
In addition to saving time for the hotel, it has also saved time for their clients. “One of the key benefits of using Cvent Event Diagramming is that you can be collaborative with your clients. They can log into the tool, and you can work together on the diagrams in real-time, which has ultimately helped us win more repeat business.”
“Another benefit of using the software is that it’s helped us win more business. We recently had a situation where a client wanted to know if we could fit her event inside our restaurant, so we put together the full plan to show her that yes, it can fit.”
