September update — Three new modules

1. Customer feedback

Once a booking has actually taken place, the feedback module emails the customer and asks them how it went. They give an overall score out of five, and can rate four things separately if they want to: cleanliness, getting in, communication and facilities. Every one of those is optional, so somebody in a hurry can answer the first question and be done.

There are two comment boxes, and they do different jobs. “Overall, how would you describe your experience?” is the one you might publish. “Anything we should put right?” is private, and only ever seen by your staff — the place for the broken door handle nobody wants to make a fuss about.

Who gets asked, and how often

You choose. In settings, feedback invites go out either only when a member of staff sends one, once, after a customer’s first booking, or after the first session of every new booking. Whichever you pick, there’s a button on the booking screen to ask a particular customer there and then, and nobody gets chased twice for the same booking.

The report

Scores are reported over a date range and can be narrowed to a single facility, so you can see that the Main Hall is doing fine and the Committee Room is not. You get the overall average, how the ratings are spread — an average of 4.2 built from straight 4s is a different venue from one built from 5s and 2s — and your response rate, because an invite that nobody answered is still counted. There’s a PDF if you need to put it in front of a committee.

Category averages stay hidden until at least five people have answered. An average drawn from one reply reads like a fact, and it isn’t one.

Good comments become testimonials

If a customer ticks the box to say their comment can be shown publicly, it turns up in a Ready to publish list. One click puts it on your centre’s website through the website editor’s testimonials block, and one click takes it down again. The customer decides whether their name appears or whether it goes up anonymously, and that choice is recorded at the moment they make it — so a published testimonial keeps its wording even if they’re renamed or archived later.

Nothing is published by default. If they didn’t give permission, the option to publish isn’t there.

2. Address lookups

Typing a full billing address into a form on a phone is nobody’s favourite job, and it’s where a half-finished booking tends to get abandoned. This module puts a search box above the billing address fields on both the standard booking form and the billing stage of a custom booking form.

Your customer starts typing and picks their address from the suggestions, and the street, town, state and postcode fields fill themselves in. Addresses come from the official national address file, so they’re the ones the mail service recognises — which means fewer invoices going to a house number that doesn’t exist.

Where it works

Your venue’s own country decides which address data is searched: the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway are all covered. A customer whose billing address is somewhere else simply types it in as before — the fields are still there.

There’s no account to open and nothing to sign. The address data comes through our own supplier account, so switching the module on is the whole setup.

3. SMS alerts

Email is still the right way to send an invoice, a receipt or a reply to a booking request. It just isn’t always the right way to get somebody’s attention. This module sends a short text to the customer’s mobile at the same time as the email, so they know to go and look for it.

The link in the text opens that one message and its attachments, in a browser, with no password and no login. That was a deliberate choice: the link is the only credential it carries, so a text forwarded to a family member shows them one invoice, not the run of somebody’s account.

Where you can add one

Wherever your staff send an email by hand, there’s now a Send SMS alert choice next to it — on invoices, payment receipts, replies to booking requests, and general customer emails. Scheduled notifications can carry one too, so a reminder the day before a booking arrives as a text as well as an email.

An alert can only ever follow an email that actually went out. If the email fails, no text is sent.

Customers stay in charge of it

Anyone can turn text alerts off in their email preferences and keep getting the emails. Customers with no mobile number on file are skipped automatically. Because of that, sending to three people might produce one text — which is exactly what it should do, and it’s worth knowing before it looks like a fault.

Switching them on

All three are on the Modules page in your system, and each one installs in a click. Feedback adds a monthly line to your subscription; address lookups and SMS alerts are pay-as-you-go and come out of your prepaid credit, so if you never use them they never cost anything.