First Tee Increases Registration Speed with Mobile-Friendly Approach

First Tee provides programs that impact young people, helping them build character and gain life-enhancing skills through the game of golf. To achieve these positive impacts, First Tee relies heavily on Salesforce to manage customer sign up and registration for a wide range of courses across 150+ Chapters. Before this project, the organization’s Salesforce registration system was not optimal, which impacted the experience of participants and their parents.

Users and Chapters requested improvements to the registration experience, noting that the existing system was not mobile-friendly. Since many parents use mobile devices to register their children, modernizing the system became a top priority. Architectural limitations in the previous registration environment also caused the system to crash during highly trafficked registration times, such as new event openings. 

In addition, many participants need financial aid across the network, and the process to get it was not easy and did not meet the needs of all chapters. 

With participant experience suffering and a desire to improve the end-to-end digital experience and solve these problems holistically, First Tee turned to CapTech as a trusted partner.

CapTech’s human-centered approach to digital problems brought expertise and insight to First Tee’s challenges. To begin, the team conducted a thorough discovery phase with a sample of chapters to understand current operational challenges, identify customer personas, and pinpoint the critical needs of First Tee chapters and participants. With this foundation, CapTech collaborated with First Tee to design a solution that addressed the organization’s major pain points and supported a wide range of customizable features to support First Tee’s diverse chapter network. 

The project leveraged a Salesforce Experience Cloud implementation with a mobile-friendly approach to enhance the user experience for parents and participants. This implementation enabled chapters to customize features to meet their unique needs. Not only did the new solution support mobile and desktop registration reliably, it also enabled a payment processing API to smooth online transactions and added language support for First Tee’s multiple regions. 

As the new registration solution was being built, First Tee had to maintain the existing one for a while, running both in parallel. Together, we ensured the rollout had little impact on the daily administration of the organization. The team led a staggered rollout to gather early feedback and provide responsive support for the early adopters. The team then applied this feedback to improve subsequent phases of the rollout. The effort also leveraged as many existing data structures as possible, limiting any downtime. The new registration system featured an error monitoring capability to improve proactive resolution by alerting support staff of registration issues without waiting for complaint reports. The team also collaborated with First Tee to develop training videos to ease the transition and guide parents in using the new registration platform.

First Tee’s new registration system provides a modern, mobile-friendly experience. Chapters report the new system is significantly easier to use, requiring less time for registration completion while resulting in fewer support calls. Parents can now search for specific curriculum with filters for age, location, date, and eligibility. Meanwhile stability has greatly improved; the new system handles the increased volumes of event openings with consistent performance. 

First Tee chapters have also increased the reach and efficiency of their community impact with the new system. Multi-lingual support enabled the opening of a new Quebec chapter and better serves Spanish-speaking communities. Flexible financial aid, early registration links, and the ability to provide customer credits empower First Tee chapters to better serve their customers. First Tee has developed a roadmap of future enhancements to the system, including discount codes for a modern ecommerce experience, additional payment processor options, and smarter course waitlists. 

This enhanced registration platform has broadened
First Tee’s opportunities to impact young people and serve local community organizations and schools. Additionally, the improved flexibility and resilience gives First Tee leaders more time to focus on the young people they serve.