Our studios have been back open for a couple of weeks now, which means that most of you have had your first experience booking a class with our new booking system (we hope ;-) ). A question that has come up on a regular basis is: “Why did you move to this new system when the old one seemed fine?”
And I agree, the old booking system was fine. Maybe – if I’m honest - even a little bit better than our current system, as many of you have come to us with difficulties. However, our previous system was not sustainable for many reasons, and this migration was a necessary step that we couldn’t postpone any longer. I’d like to give you a peek ‘behind the scenes’ of Delight, so I can explain why we had to implement a new booking system and ask for your patience as we continue to make improvements.
Outgrowing our past
Over the past 15 years, Delight has grown from a small yoga school with one location into a flourishing yoga school with 5 different locations and close to 4000 bookings per week (pre-corona). When Delight first opened, we worked with one developer who hard-coded our website and customised it to all our wishes. The result of this was the beautiful website that so many of you are accustomed to.
As our organisation kept growing, so did our so-called ‘tech-stack’. Behind the scenes we were working with several different IT solutions that kept adding on, becoming tied together in a construction that eventually became inefficient. To give you one example: we didn’t have a proper content management system for our website, therefore we needed our developer for every small change we wanted to make.
Issues like this, on top of our total reliance on one developer who held all our membership data (a huge risk), led to us making a major decision last year. We had to face the facts: we had outgrown our IT.
###Moving through the growing pains These are the reasons why we’ve decided to start fresh with a new platform that can automise all the manual work, store all our information in one place, and most importantly, that isn’t dependent on one developer. Even though it might seem now as if we’ve taken a step back in the short term, I believe the long-term improvement of our organization is the challenges we are experiencing. While I understand your current frustrations, I hope that you can forgive these initial ‘growing pains’. We promise that our website will soon reflect the high quality experience you are used to at Delight.
Over the next few months, we’ll be working closely with our new booking platform to improve the user experience. And in just a couple of weeks we will launch our new Delight app, so you can easily book classes from your mobile device!
Thank you so much for your patience and understanding. Do you have questions about how the new system works? You can find many common questions below or visit our FAQ for a comprehensive list of solutions. You can also reach out to our Community Care department if you experience any issues.
Namasté,
Judith