Tutorial 3.4: Setting up customer bookings

In this tutorial, we will run through the bookings module of the system, and how to create a new booking for a customer

If your business undertakes events or seminars where bookings are required then the Booking feature can help significantly streamline administrative tasks whilst helping improve overall customer experience. The booking feature enables your customers to make bookings on your website for specific events. The system will track capacity and will send follow-up emails to customers before, on and after the booking date to maximize customer experience.

Here are some of the key features that will help you outperform your competitors:

• Manages bookings, capacity and customer experience
• Setup follow-up emails to be sent to customers before, on or after booking date.
• Setup auto-responder email to be sent to customers when booking is made
• Accept group bookings under one customers name
• Completely customizable booking form
• Classify each booking event so they can be published easily on the web
• Ability to accept real-time credit card processing functionality in booking form
• Full booking history on a per customer basis

Contents 1 Creating a Booking 1.1 The Editor 2 Displaying Bookings on your website 2.1 Using the full solution 2.2 Using 3rd Party Hosting 2.3 Bookings List (List Template) 2.4 Booking Details (Details Template) 2.5 Booking Form 3 Classifying Bookings 4 Making a Booking 5 Booking Rejection 6 Booking Auto-Responder 7 Follow-Ups 8 Subscribers 9 Customizing Bookings 9.1 The List Layout 9.2 The Details Layout 9.3 Using a different booking web form for each booking 9.4 Changing a booking web form 9.5 Customizing the Confirmation Message

Creating a Booking

When you create an event booking you have to decide whether the event requires capacity management or not. Capacity management indicates whether your event requires the system to control the number of available spots and it should stop further bookings once the capacity limit is reached. If you don't require capacity management then you should leave the Capacity field empty, otherwise enter the number of spots available for your event.

Every event has a date. This is the date when the event takes place. Providing a date is mandatory and bookings can only be made up to and including todays date.

To create a new booking, go to Modules -> Bookings and click Create a New Booking

The Editor

After you provide the date and capacity of a booking you then proceed to providing its details. The details should consist of everything that is relevant to the event and useful for your customers. The editors content is displayed in the Details template of a booking, i.e. when the customer selects a booking then its details are displayed. Refer to Customizing Bookings for more details on this.

Displaying Bookings on your website

There are a number of ways you can display bookings on your website. If you use this solution for your entire website then clicking "Add Booking to a web page" and using a 1-Click Insert will add it to a page or you can use a Module manager.

If you host your website at a 3rd party then you need to manually add a link to a booking which when selected will load the details of a booking and provide options for your customer to book themselves into it.

Using the full solution

To add one or more bookings to a web page simply click on the Add Booking to a web page link in Action Box.

1. Click the web page to add bookings to
2. On the toolbar of the WYSIWYG editor select from one of the 1-Click Insert options
3. Display this booking only - will place the booking module on the web page to display the current booking only
4. Display all bookings - will place the booking module on the web page to display all bookings in the system
5. Display all bookings within a classification - will place the booking module on the web page to display all bookings that you have previously classified in the selected category. Refer to Classifying Bookings below for more details.
6. Click on Save and Publish to complete

Now click on the "Preview in new browser" link to see your web page and booking(s) in a web browser.

Using 3rd Party Hosting

If you are hosting your website at a 3rd Party then you must link to a booking. Clicking the "Preview in new browser" link will open the booking in a new browser reveling the URL of the booking which you can then copy and paste into your page.

Bookings List (List Template)

You have complete control over how your bookings are displayed on your website. For example you may want to display all upcoming bookings on a web page or alternatively display related bookings together on separate web pages. Below is an example of the list view of bookings. This can be customized to suit your needs, see Customizing Bookings.

Booking Details (Details Template)

When a booking is selected from a list of bookings its details are shown to the customer. You have complete control over the layout and the look and feel of your bookings (see Customizing Bookings). Below is an example of the detailed view of a booking.

Booking Form

The booking form collects your customers details and allows them to actually book for the event. It is placed within the Booking Details template. You can customize the booking form to suit the needs of your business and add custom forms to it see Customizing Bookings.

Classifying Bookings

Bookings may be assigned to one or more categories. Each event that your business organizes can be classified within a subject. When you classify events in categories you make it easy to publish them on web pages, by allowing you to group related bookings together. Here is how classification works:

Imagine you are a financial advisory business which holds seminars educating individuals on Tax matters as well as Superannuation matters. You have a series of seminars in each topic coming up over the next few months. You can assign the tax related seminars under the "tax" category and the superannuation seminars under the "superannuation" category. Assign a classification under the classifications tab, by moving your desired classifications from left to right.

By classifying bookings you can publish groups of them at once on any web page. For instance by placing the booking module on a web page that displays all superannuation seminars, as you add more seminars related to superannuation they will automatically appear on your website without any further editing of web pages required. When a booking is held and is in the past it is automatically removed from your website.

Note: You can manage your category list and create new categories that are relevant to your business! This is done under Admin -> Manage Categories.

Making a Booking

There are two ways customers can book for an event.

1.The customer fills in the booking form on the website. This is the most common method

2.The site owner can manually add a customer to one of your events. This is done via the View list of Subscribers link when viewing a booking in the administration or via the Manage Customer Bookings link when viewing a customers record.

Booking Rejection

There are a number of reasons for the system to not accept a booking, these include:

• The customer is already booked for the event (the system uses the customer's email address for identification)
• The booking has reached capacity
• Booking date is in the past
• Booking is no longer available, e.g. disabled or deleted

Booking Auto-Responder

The booking auto-responder is an email that is sent to a customer when they make a booking to an event. Generally the auto responder email should contain information about the event, include a thank you note and any other information that is relevant and important to your customers. Auto responder emails are mandatory and are always emailed to customers.

You have complete control over the content and look and feel of your auto responder email. You can set the from name, the email address from which the auto responder is sent from, the format of the email, e.g. HTML or text and the content. If you have access to the entire solution you can also choose a template that is used for your email to conform to your corporate identity.

Follow-Ups

Follow-ups are a fundamental part of the bookings feature. Follow-ups allow you to automate communication to the subscribers of a booking using email before, on or after the booking date.

A typical follow up scenario might go like this:

• 1 week before the event, a short thank you and reminder of the event
• 1 day before, remind them again, providing detailed information on the venue, the speakers and a map to get to the venue
• 1 day after, thank them for their attendance and ask for feedback via a feedback form
• 1 week after, notify them of another upcoming event - would they be interested?

The system allows you to enter in these follow up emails for a booking. The system will then automatically email your customers and inform them with the content previously defined by you on the dates that you set.

To create a follow-up:

1. Click on the Create Follow-Ups Emails link
2. Click on the Add New Follow-up link

3. Enter the follow-up details including:
3.1 Email address
3.2 Subject
3.3 Email Content
3.4 Choose the appropriate Delivery Day.
3.4.1 For a follow-up to be sent 7 days BEFORE the booking date your Delivery Day should be -7 (minus 7).
3.4.2 For the follow-up to be emailed 1 day before an event set the Delivery Day to -1.
3.4.3 For a delivery on the day of the booking enter 0 (zero) in the Delivery Day input box.
3.4.4 For follow-ups to go after the booking date, simply enter a positive number, e.g. 1 for 1 day AFTER the booking date and so forth

4. Click Save to complete the creation of your Follow-up

Add more follow-ups as required

Subscribers

The View the List Subscribers link displays the list of customers who are currently booked for the current booking. You can manually add other customers to your booking using the Quick Subscribe form in this tab. You can also remove customers from this booking by selecting the Remove link next to each customer.

Customizing Bookings

All aspects of a booking can be customized to suit your needs. Bookings are similar to Announcements and FAQs - there are two templates that you can customize to ensure bookings appearance is inline with your expectations. These templates come pre-configured and you should only explore them if you want to further customize the appearance of bookings. All customization of these templates can be done under Admin -> More Customization Options, then Booking Layouts

The List Layout

The List template defines how a group of bookings are displayed on a page. For instance if you are holding a series of 4 seminars in the month of August, then you may want to display all of them on a web page. The list layout controls how these 4 bookings are displayed together on a web page.

You may move each tag to the position you desire, and add new tags via the tag manager or tag list.

The Details Layout

Details layout defines how a booking is displayed after it has been selected. In this instance once a customer chooses one of the upcoming seminars in August it is loaded and displayed exactly how you have setup your booking Details template.

If you are already familiar with customizing Announcement or FAQ templates you know that the appearance of these types of content is entirely customizable. Layout, style sheets, colors and the information that is displayed is controlled and positioned as you want it, via the use of tags and the tag list.

Using a different booking web form for each booking

All bookings within your system will use the same List and Detail templates.

Generally the Detail template will contain a web form which is used as your booking form. This approach means one form is universal for all bookings, i.e. one booking cannot use a different booking form to another booking.

However, if you require a different booking form for each individual booking you have set up, then you will need to remove the booking web form from the Detail template, and place it instead in the Booking Details section for each individual booking (i.e. in the editor window where you place other information about the booking).

Changing a booking web form

You can easily create booking forms using the web forms feature. After you have created your web form you must insert it into the Booking Detail layout in Admin -> More Customization Options -> Booking Layouts. Ensure you delete the existing web form on this layout. Only one web form can be placed on this layout.

Customizing the Confirmation Message

By default a system message is displayed every time a booking is made. You can customize this message via Admin -> More Customization Options -> System Messages.

You can also configure your booking form to go directly to a web page that you designate. This web page can be hosted with Your Online Business or a 3^rd party hosting provider.

To do this you need to append the following to your web forms action URL:

e.g.

action=/FormProcessv2.aspx?........

change to:

action=/FormProcessv2.aspx?........&PageID=/Results.htm

You can also use JavaScript to conditionally set the confirmation web page of a booking form. For example if a customer is choosing their City, then if the customer choose LA then you can redirect to the LA landing page and for San Francisco you can redirect to the San Francisco landing page. Refer to the Support Forums for examples of this.