Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries NSW (SMCNSW) is a trusted custodian of two of Sydney’s most iconic cemetery parklands. However, SMCNSW was struggling with their out-of-date and clunky website which generated a lot of manual work. On top of that, funeral directors who wanted to make a booking were limited to phone bookings during office hours with no access to online services. SMCNSW reached out to us to find an effective solution.

"Working with Engaging.io has been a great experience. Their knowledge and creative ideas have helped our business grow innovatively and evolve as thought leaders in our industry. Engaging.io have always delivered outstanding products including our website and an online booking portal. They also work well to deadlines and budget requirements. We could not recommend Engaging.io highly enough!"

Natasha West, SMCNSW

The Challenge

As custodians of Woronora Memorial Park and Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park, SMCNSW has people at the heart of everything they do. Their aim is to make the process of planning a funeral or visiting the cemetery as simple and accessible as possible. However, their website was the very antithesis of their aim, as it was outdated and was not able to collect information needed to make bookings. 

The new marketing team had no way to update the site or manage other marketing and communications activity and the only way to accept bookings was via phone call between 9-5 on weekdays.

SMCNSW clearly needed a new website to replace their old one to equip them with the tools to make it easy for both themselves to use and for their clients to navigate. They also needed a platform which allowed funeral directors to make bookings at any time without needing to call up. In addition, this platform had to make it easy for SMCNSW staff to approve any necessary documentation regarding bookings. 

What Did We Do?

We met up with SMCNSW to better understand their exact requirements and, after some discussion, they decided that HubSpot would be the best solution for both their marketing/communications and website. 

Whilst setting up the marketing team on HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, we also began research and testing for the user experience of the new website. We created personas and drafted up wireframes and designs to get the best foundation in place for the website. 

After the UX and design phase, we began building a brand new website for them using HubSpot’s CMS. We set up the website in a modular way to ensure that SMCNSW could continue to use the website and all it’s features without the need for ongoing technical help.

After the website came the Funeral Directors (FDs) booking portal. Because of the complex requirements and integration with existing legacy systems, we decided on a custom platform. This would allow FDs to book at any time, while integrating with SMCNSW’s internal OPUS system and ensuring necessary documents could be uploaded, checked and approved/rejected.

As a result, we built an externally hosted application from scratch with a simple to use interface, that is easily administered by the SMCNSW admin team, and integrates with both HubSpot and OPUS.

What Happened Next?

SMCNSW’s new website is much more functional than their last and created alignment with their view that client’s experiences need to be seamless and simple. Visitors can easily find the information they are looking for and the positive feedback has been overwhelming. 

The new marketing team are also super excited, being able to manage the site and communications with ease, and all from the same platform.

FDs, while sometimes hard to please, have been very positive about the flexibility of the new booking system. Both SMCNSW and FDs now follow a much simpler process whilst cutting down admin time and reducing errors. This has led to increased bookings and forged a better relationship between these groups.