Who is Workspace?

Workspace provides flexible offices, co-working spaces, and meeting rooms across London. More than that, however, Workspace provides a community that connects like-minded individuals and businesses and provides networking opportunities that would otherwise note present themselves.

Prior to the app solution by Future Platforms, Workspace clients found the room booking experience more difficult. Now, the new app allows Workspace to target its audience and customers with an improved brand offering and a better way to book available space.

Brief

Thousands of businesses rely on Workspace for flexible office space across the capital. The company knew it had to provide a more unified, customer-friendly solution that made the room-booking journey easier, quicker, and more enjoyable.

Mobile is a key channel for the Workspace audience. Future Platforms capitalised on this to provide a solution for its client base on the device they rely on most. After discovering the main user pain point was with the lack-of-ease with which to book rooms, Future Platforms knew an app would best address this problem, and it would be the most convenient way for users to quickly and easily book rooms. The app needed to provide value for its very specific business and tenant need – for this reason, it needed to be bespoke.

Approach

Due to their specific requirements, Workspace knew that an off-the-shelf app would not meet its technical requirements from an app perspective, but also (and more importantly) the community experience that it wanted to cultivate.

Future Platforms was chosen as its partner due to its extensive experience creating award-winning apps, as well as with enhancing customer experiences through mobile strategies. Workspace wanted to work with a vendor that looked at its business as a whole, taking into account market research, tenant requirements, and an in-depth understanding of its unique value proposition, which is what Future Platforms delivered.

Future Platforms and Workspace partnered together to conduct comprehensive user research to understand specific pain points and outline the features that would address these to enhance the customer experience. A key user frustration was the difficulty of the existing room booking process; both companies outlined ways in which this could be streamlined and focused around this as a starting point for the solution.

From the research, it was clear that there were two main pain points that the app needed to solve:

Customer frustration: The room-booking process was complex and had limited visibility of the available rooms, their suitability, and their locations across multiple offices.

Business frustration: the capacity of its meeting rooms wasn’t utilised. Tenants were not aware of all the possibilities and of what they could achieve with Workspace’s rooms, so the company wanted this better highlighted in the app.

Future Platforms created a room booking app that addresses these by providing users with the ability to search depending on a range of parameters; such as a specific building, or by map view, room size, and available facilities. Additionally, the app provides key customer data that allows the companies to keep evolving on and improving the customer experience.

Outcome

Users can seamlessly book and pay using the app but the app is more than a collection of features. It creates a sense of community through outlining the facilities in its collaborative areas, urging tenants to connect with other tenants and with Workspace as well.

As an additional benefit for Workspace, the Future Platforms team built the app on Kotlin multiplatform. This means the process of creating the app, from start to finish, was more cost-effective, simpler, and quicker to produce for the business.

All this is just the beginning. In order to boost its community offering, Future Platforms is working with Workspace on an exciting upcoming roadmap of app features that are even further aligned to the needs of its customers.

Tens of thousands of customers have downloaded the app and users are booking rooms on a regular basis, which continues to drive revenue for the client and improve the lives of its users.