Savannah Sports Council Partners with haku to Optimize Participant Experience without Missing a Step

June 23, 2021

At the turn of 2021, Savannah Sports Council undertook a significant migration to haku’s all-in-one and industry-leading platform. Through its new partnership with haku, Savannah Sports Council discovered that delivering a personalized and enhanced participant experience over multiple events requires powerful technology, a valuable partner, and a seamless onboarding process.

“As we were evaluating our technology needs, we started looking to organizations that we aspire to be and kept hearing about haku,” said Rob Wells, Director of Savannah Sports Council. “If you want to be a big race, you’ve got to act like a big race.”

The transition could have been disruptive for the Savannah Sports Council team, community, and registered participants. However, as a part of every haku partnership, Savannah Sports Council was matched with a Customer Experience team to be an extension of their team throughout the entire partnership. From day one, Savannah Sports Council’s dedicated haku Customer Experience team worked with them to plan out a best-in-class onboarding experience tailored to their specific needs and goals. Throughout the onboarding journey, haku’s Customer Experience team spent time diligently understanding Savannah Sports Council and what makes them unique, including all of their event details, aspirations, and challenges. By understanding pain points and opportunities, haku’s Customer Experience team can develop on-brand solutions throughout the partnership to drive more success for Savannah Sports Council.

“haku’s unmatched partnership and innovative technology ecosystem enables a seamless onboarding process and experience,” said haku Founder and CEO Carlos Escobar. “This gives our new partners more time to focus on their core business objectives and new opportunities.”

One of the most important aspects of any onboarding process is data migration. This is because haku understands the power of historical data and the advantage new partners have when they can take action on their data, glean valuable insights and provide personalized experiences from day one. Poor quality data can cost organizations money and affect integral components of their business, such as participant information and the overall understanding of one’s community. Through Savannah Sports Council’s diligent Customer Experience team, Savannah Sports Council’s data was cleaned, prepped, and meticulously imported successfully. This allowed Savannah Sports Council to better respond to the needs of their participants from the first day of adoption.

Prioritizing meticulous data migration to haku’s platform during onboarding ensures that Savannah Sports Council is able to grow and manage their events with no interruption. This also empowered Savannah Sports Council with a single source of truth for their data, which resulted in a stronger understanding of their entire community. With centralized visibility in place, Savannah Sports Council can easily discover more powerful insights and quickly take action.

“From importing all of our historical data to transitioning our live events with all of the present covid complications, the onboarding process with haku has been amazing,” said Katelyn Presti, Event Manager of Savannah Sports Council.

During the onboarding process, haku also aligned Savannah Sports Council with its one-of-a-kind in-house Participant Services team. This team supports Savannah Sports Council and their community by managing participant support through multiple touchpoints. Implementing participant support begins by haku crafting an individualized, detailed support plan and escalation procedures so that haku’s team can answer both technical and non-technical questions through phone, email, and live chat. By becoming experts in Savannah Sports Council’s policies and procedures, haku’s Participant’s Services team is able to ensure a positive and seamless experience throughout every participant interaction, including registration, participant and fundraising accounts, memberships, and more. After offloading customer service for Savannah Sports Council, haku has already solved over 100 customer service requests across email, phone, and live chat in just a few weeks.

“haku’s customer support team has made a huge impact in our business operations,” said Presti. “Having the haku team manage our participant support has been a significant weight lifted off our shoulders.”

“Working with haku is like having extra staff, without having to pay for them,” said Wells.

Starting from onboarding, haku approaches every partnership as a long-term partnership, which is why they’re dedicated to continually investing time and resources to ensure their partners are constantly surpassing goals long after the onboarding process is complete. To align and grow with Savannah Sports Council, haku’s Customer Experience team also creates a highly effective communication plan around what’s best for the team, including Slack channels, weekly phone calls, text, and more. By creating these communication flows, assistance from haku is always available, making it truly be an extension of Savannah Sports Council’s team. As new goals and aspirations unfold, haku will be there, like family, every step of the way.

“In the short amount of time that we’ve worked with haku, we can already feel that sense of family,” said Presti. “The weekly calls and ongoing communication with our customer experience reps have been so helpful. The level of communication we now have with our technology partner is great.”

With haku’s powerful platform and their experienced Customer Experience and Participant Services teams by their side, Savannah Sports Council has already seen a reduction in their workload and time involving event tasks such as registration setup, e-commerce operations, and participant support. As a relationship-driven organization, haku prides itself on being there for its partners whenever or wherever they need, which is why Savannah Sports Council’s Customer Experience team will be on the ground at their upcoming in-person events.

“We’ve only begun to unlock the power of haku’s platform and the benefits it brings for our day-to-day operations,” said Presti. “A process that used to take 5 minutes, like a participant deferral, now only takes 2 seconds.”

“We’re a small team so having the haku team as an extension of our own is very exciting for us,” said Wells. “To know we’ll have the haku team at our events to help us and our volunteers is going to be extremely beneficial.”

Reimagine a seamless switch to an unparalleled technology partner today by reaching out to the haku team at sales@hakusports.com.

About haku:

haku is an unparalleled technology partner that forward-thinking organizations are working with to create the most powerful events and surpass their goals. Through a robust all-in-one platform and modern peer-to-peer fundraising suite, world-class organizations can better plan and promote events, track progress, engage their participants, and move their events and businesses forward – all with haku’s state-of-the-art technology ecosystem and unmatched partnership. haku is trusted by organizations such as the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, Boston Athletic Association, Team In Training (LLS), Marine Corps Marathon Organization, J&A Racing, Houston Marathon, Atlanta Track Club, Philadelphia Eagles, Mercedes Benz Corporate Run, and many more.

To learn more about haku, please visit www.hakusports.com

About Savannah Sports Council:

The Savannah Sports Council was established in 1993. Our mission is to develop sport-related events that impact our community. By working with local, regional, national and international organizations the Savannah Sports Council supports a wide range of events that offer a diverse opportunity to athletes of all ages and all sports. The Savannah Sports Council works in conjunction with Visit Savannah and Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce to enrich the city of Savannah and Chatham County.