Fun and functional experiences go digital


Fun and functional experiences go digital

Funlab

Fun and functional experiences go digital

Digital experiences created for Funlab
Digital experiences created for Funlab

Funlab

Fun and functional experiences go digital

Funlab

Fun and functional experiences go digital

Digital experiences created for Funlab

Funlab

Fun and functional experiences go digital

Digital experiences created for Funlab
Digital experiences created for Funlab

Fun and functional experiences go digital

For more than two decades, Funlab’s business has been the business of fun. 

Its venues across Australia and New Zealand serve up “competitive socialised experiences,” giving kids and adults reconnecting with their inner child the freedom and the physical space to play. 

From escape rooms to bowling to just about everything in between, Funlab is a go-to destination for “weird and wonderful experiences,” and it doesn’t want the weird and wonderful vibes to stop the moment its customers head home.

Services
Experience & Commerce

Industry
Media & Entertainment

Market
Australia, New Zealand

Tech Partners
Salesforce

  • 69%

    increase in conversion for booking flow

  • 100+

    design system components, shared among eight brands

  • 100%

    increase in digital visits

  • 200%

    increase in digital revenue

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The challenge

Seeking to bring those incredible branded venue experiences to life in the digital world, Funlab struck up a partnership with us in 2019. The aim was ambitious: make their end-to-end digital experiences as smooth as a perfect strike or a hole-in-one for consumers, while ensuring that the business would be as satisfied as someone who set a new high score.

We focused on four areas:

  1. Driving sales growth
  2. Managing a family of brands easily and efficiently in the digital space
  3. Building a holistic view of customers to power customer-first experiences
  4. Getting more value and delivering more rewards to Funlab’s best customers
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Our creative work for Funlab - it's very pink!

The approach

Digital booking that delivers

Across the Funlab family, groups small and large book outings for just about everything. A reimagined booking flow, tested with users and continuously optimized, has driven a 69% lift in conversions already.

A flexible, integrated design system

With a large family of brands and planned expansion, Funlab needed a system to connect the brands and bring new experiences to market, fast. The design system we developed integrates designer and developer tooling, reducing time spent on web development tasks. Connections to the content management system makes spinning up new sites a breeze.

Using Salesforce to develop a clearer customer picture

You can’t deliver customer-first experiences without a 360-degree view of your customer.  Using Salesforce, we were able to connect previously siloed data, allowing Funlab to drive more tailored visits across the brand family and across occasions for each guest.

A fun new way to play via subscription

With the power of their digital platform in place, Funlab was able to launch a subscription offering for guests and families, called FunPass. It encourages guests to visit all Funlab brands and activities, while delivering great value to their very best customers. 

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The outcome

Over the last five years, Funlab has brought the spirit of its “weird and wonderful” in-person experiences to the digital realm by developing a multi-brand booking and management experience that drives real sales growth, launching a loyalty programme that has tripled digital revenue. It has also invested in design-to-dev tools that bring scale, speed, and consistency to its brand architecture and in data foundations that allow them to keep their focus trained on the only Player One that matters in this game, the customer.

Now, we’re helping Funlab continue to level up, going beyond screens to truly personalised, omni-channel experiences, blending the best of venue and home into one exceptional fun place to be.

Funlab

Quote
Working with Merkle has opened up a lot of doors for us. We’ve built out the landscape from a technology perspective that opens up a lot of opportunities that we never thought we had.
Author
Ben Wild
Author Description
Chief Technology Officer, Funlab
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