Joining the Vancouver Club is about an experience that delivers the best that life has to offer — and the status that comes with it. At the Club, members know everything is taken care of, so whether they are looking for a focused productivity space, to impress a potential business partner, or to attend uniquely crafted social events, everything is ready for them.

It took an army of disconnected processes to make this possible. Member data was managed and accessed from multiple systems, in various formats, across different departments. Nothing was connected, so the Club was heavily reliant on a few key employees that “knew everything about the members”. We partnered with the Club to create the digital foundation that put all the pieces together, enabling the next generation of impeccable service — something the entire organization could get behind.

While our work often involves creating entirely new digital experiences from scratch or creating new offerings that strengthen existing digital solutions, The Vancouver Club provided a new challenge. Their member experience is already phenomenal. For over 125 years, a variety of manual and in-person activities made it all possible. Our task was to translate these behind-the-scenes activities to the digital world without adding overhead for staff or interrupting the member experience.

The Vancouver Club is meant to be a warm, analog environment that lets members live in the moment without the distractions that screens bring — with many rooms having no-device policies. It’s a welcome escape for members. To succeed, our solution had to be a suite of applications that created cohesion between multiple business units throughout the Club, but was invisible to the members.

In order to develop a cohesive solution across business units like membership services, bar service, accounting, catering, and more, we had to understand their unique needs. So we worked with them all. Designers from the project team shadowed the concierge and membership services teams, held working sessions with accounting, worked from the Club observing staff and member interactions, and more.

The goal of this was empathy. When solving a business’ problem it’s not enough to empathize with the customer, you also must empathize with the business so that you can understand what will help them successfully serve their customers. We sought to not just understand the fundamental nature of their process, but understand their culture as a whole. This collaborative process brought everyone together, with strategy, design, and development all working closely with The Vancouver Club.

The result of this process was a platform for The Vancouver Club called Project Laura — named for a long-time employee with a gift for knowing all the details and preferences about everyone at The Club. Project Laura is a web-based experience that is mobile and tablet-friendly; making it easy for staff to discreetly use it.

The key to the success of Project Laura is the data. With multiple tools in use (such as point-of-sale, accounting, and booking software) the challenge was bringing this all together. We’re not interested in spending time and budget re-inventing the wheel, so we utilized a combination of custom and existing tools and microservices to create a platform that effectively collects and stores data from multiple sources in a strong and consistent fashion. A variety of APIs are in use, pulling this data in and out of tools and across databases to create a unified experience for the entire team at The Vancouver Club.

Introducing a new system to manage all of The Club’s data is not only a tall order, but a risky one. To ensure a smooth rollout of Project Laura, we worked in phases starting with a minimum viable product. With an MVP and its corresponding features in use, we were able to start validating the needs of the business, bringing in learnings, and improving as we go. It was split into three stages: past memories, storing knowledge we already have; new memories, logging things as they come up; and first words, creating a system that can be predictive in its outputs.

For our first iteration, past memories were introduced with a member management tool that aggregates baseline membership profile data. Our next iteration incorporated data from the Club’s point-of-sale systems, and other purchase behaviour to provide value and fine-tuned service based on member usage — the new memories. With this data incorporated, it sets us up for our next step: first words. This is where we have the ability to be smarter and offer suggestions for staff to better surprise and delight members. It’s not just about serving up what members already like, it’s about powering informed predictions about new experiences.