Bookings
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Contents |
Overview
If your business undertakes events or seminars where bookings are required then the Bookings 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
Creating a Booking Event
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
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.
How Customers Can Make Bookings
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.
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.
Related Basic Articles
- Booking Follow-Up Emails
- Calendar Module
- Classifying Bookings
- Customizing Bookings
- Displaying Bookings On Your Website
- Tutorial 3.4: Setting up customer bookings
Related Advanced Articles
- Booking Multiple Seats Under One Name
- Collecting Payments For Bookings
- Customizing The Booking Confirmation Message
