New! Manage and Publish customer reviews

We've just launched a new important marketing feature for all Bookeo users: customer reviews.

Customer reviews are a complete overhaul and extension of the old 'Feedback' system, and now let you do much more.

How do reviews work?
At the end of a visit, Bookeo can send out an email to the customer, with a fully customizable thank you message, asking to leave a review.

The customer just clicks on a big button in the email, and leaves the review (rating and comment).

You as manager are notified of new reviews in your Home page. You can also view all past reviews from all customers. Each review is also accessible from its associated booking, and you can view all reviews left by a customer.

When editing a review, you can now publish it. To publish a review means to show it to other customers, when they make a booking or even directly in your web site.

When publishing a review you can also select part of the comment as summary, which is very handy when customers leave long reviews and you only want to show your favorite snippet of text ("Great experience!" etc).

You can automatically show reviews in the booking page (at each step of the booking process) and even in your own web site. Automatically showing reviews in your own web site is a feature unique to Bookeo which we think is extremely important for marketing. After all, you want to use reviews to convince your customers to make a booking with you, so it is very important to show them even before they reach your booking page.

So you can easily insert a small review widget in any page of your web site, in the position that you prefer. You can customize colors, styles, backgrounds, size, end even how many reviews to show. Customers can easily navigate in the widget to view all your reviews, or to expand a review to view the full comment.

As usual we're very sensitive about privacy, so you have full control about how many details you want to show about the author of the review. First name? Last name? City? Country? etc. You can reveal as little or as much as you want.

Finally, you can now export your reviews to a spreadsheet, for your own marketing purposes, exporting to other systems, etc.

Using Bookeo Reviews you can now easily attract more bookings, and convert web site visitors into paying customers!

New features

A new group of features has been introduced in recent days across our server regions.

All these features come from your suggestions, so a big thank you for your ideas!

Integration of prepaid packages and memberships
Many trainers and schools have actually suggested this very good idea. When a customer pays for his recurring membership (weekly, monthly, etc) Bookeo can now assign to his account a number of prepaid credits in different packages. For example you can offer to your gym members 2 free personal training hours per month as part of their gym subscription. Neat! For more information, see http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/82099-memberships

You can now hide prepaid packages, or make them available only to members
Sometimes you don't want to let everyone to purchase a prepaid package, but you want to assign it manually to selected customer, or only let members access it. Now you can! See the new 'Accessibility' settings for prepaid packages. http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/383859-prepaid-packages-for-members-only-or-bookeo-users-only

You can now enable a 'pay later' option for customers that use a special promotion.
Very useful for tour operators who have many booking agents, with this feature now you can let your booking agents (and only them!) book without paying online. You can then use the existing promotion reports to invoice your agents every month for the bookings collected. This is the way most booking agents work in many tourist areas! For more about booking agents, see http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/90124-booking-agents-tour-operators-tour-agencies-etc-


Now stricter checks to prevent duplicate records
After listening to many requests, we've finally slightly relaxed our privacy concerns, so that now Bookeo will prevent a customer to sign in twice with the same email address, creating duplicates in your customer database. This will keep your records more organized! And of course you can still merge customer records if the same person books using different names and email address.

Many users? Now less clicking
Now you can change user's permissions over all your classes, tours, workshops much faster. A new control lets you change permissions in block, with just two clicks.

More columns in your reports
The Booking report now contains more data, including total due and paid, gift voucher used, your custom booking status....

Filter your language(s)
Bookeo now supports 19 languages - and counting. You can let customers choose their preferred languages, but too many choices can quickly become confusing. No more! You can now decide which languages to make available to your customers, so that their choice is easier. In Canada for instance you may want to enable only English and French, in Switzerland only German, French and Italian, etc. For more information, see http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/220873-default-language-and-language-selection-in-booking-page

New feature: WordPress Plugin

We've recently launched a new plugin for WordPress.
With the new plugin, it is now extremely easy to integrate the Bookeo widget in your WordPress web site!

The Bookeo WordPress plugin can be added like any other plugin to your WordPress installation, and comes with a custom configuration dialog to easily link your Bookeo account to WordPress.

new Bookeo item in WordPress menu

Once the plugin is configured, you can use a simple placeholder to place your widget in any page or text element.

placing the bookeo widget in your page

For full details and setup instructions, see our help page: http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/347548-wordpress-integration

Your customers will love online bookings!

Tips from Bookeo: let your customers know that they can now book online

Online booking can play a crucial role in the success of your business, especially by attracting more customers. Remember, once you add Bookeo widget or booking button to your website, you can accept bookings 24/7! Your customers will love the convenience of booking online!

So what should you do to inform your customers about this exciting news? How can you let them know?

• send out an email or letter to our customers announcing your online booking facility
• update your website and put a "Book now" button next to your phone number. Busy customers looking for a contact number will be able to click on the button and go directly to your booking page

• update your voice mail recording and create a sign for the front desk to announce that you now accept online booking from your website
• update your business card, brochures, price lists, to include the web address where your customers can book online. You can print labels and attach them to your promotional material
• post the news on social networking sites, including a direct link to your booking page. You can also integrate Bookeo into your Facebook page, and your customers can book online from your Facebook page

Also, as an introductory offer, you can set a discount for online bookings. As for payments, Bookeo is very flexible, and you can also let your online customers pay at the time of booking or later, if they prefer.

New feature: taxes!

With the New Year we have launched an important new feature: Taxes.

This was one of the most popular feature requests form our customers, and we listened!

You can now easily set up sales taxes, VAT, GST, or whatever the name for it is in your country/state. Bookeo will apply and calculate the correct taxes to your prices, and display a clear breakdown of the total price.

Since Bookeo serves customers in many industries in many countries, we tried to design the tax feature as flexible as possible, considering the needs and conventions of every country.

Taxes can be a percentage of the net price (ex. sales tax) or fixed (ex. a entry fee to a national park). Moreover, in some countries the custom is to show prices net of taxes (example: USA). In others, prices are normally quoted inclusive of taxes (example: Australia). We support both models: you can specify if a tax is to be considered included in the item price, or if the price is before tax. Bookeo's behavior, the way it calculates taxes and the way it displays the price breakdown, changes accordingly.

Finally, in some countries multiple sales taxes can apply (ex. federal tax, state tax...). In some cases, they both apply to the base price of the item. In other cases, they are applied in sequence (compound taxes). Bookeo supports compound taxes too!

How it works
To set up your taxes, head to the Settings/Taxes page, and click on 'New tax' to add your first tax.

tax set up

That's it! the sample settings above are enough to set up a sales tax.

When your customers book, they will see this price breakdown in the confirmation page:

price breakdown shown to customers

You can see the same price breakdown in the booking window, when editing a booking as manager. Just click on the 'question mark' icon in the price panel:

you can access the price breakdown as manager

To learn more about taxes, head to our help portal: http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/topics/132176-taxes/articles .

Mobile Revolution Puts Calendars In The Clouds

It is hard to believe that just a decade ago, the cell phone was little more than an ardent luxury for the self-important busybody. Today, smartphones are everywhere and have evolved into entirely new breeds of mobile connectivity. Once a small business staple, the personal computer acted as a command center for all things organization. But today, that one-stop-shop method is dead. We need our info on all screens all the time.

This revolution is not small in numbers. In 2011, 41% percent of workers used personal technology to access business applications, up from 31% in 2010, according to a March report released by IDC and Unisys. While the study included personal computers, a Nielsen survey found that consumers who owned a tablet were less likely to use the traditional computer.

That's why traditional business programming like appointment calendars, class scheduling and billing software have all moved online, into the cloud. This method of online appointment scheduling allows your employees access to information from anywhere, making your increasingly mobile business as speedy as your customer base.

These more agile solutions will continue as these mobile devices get more powerful and access to wi-fi becomes more universal. Until then, you can keep your post-it notes on the office monitor. But if the numbers are any indicator, their days are numbered.

New features for the last week

We've been quite busy in the last week with many new features.
Some of the things we've done are not visible, but are important changes in the back engine.
However others are very much visible and include:

• new option to ask for credit card billing address, separated from the customer main address. This is useful for those payment gateways, such as Authorize.net, that can perform validation checks using the billing address of a credit card
• possibility to hide prices until the confirmation page. This is useful when you offer services whose price varies with days of the week/times, so that customers only see the final price without getting confused by sudden changes
• a nice 'spinning wheel' image is now displayed while your booking widget is loading. especially useful for customers on slow connections
• Dutch and Danish translations

The new translations were contributed by volunteers. Thanks for your help!

We have more things to release for next week, stay tuned...