If you’ve had an account with us over the last couple years you’ve probably noticed that your customers have not had the ability to view their previous bookings or easily manage their information with you. With the start of a new year, we have a series of exciting new product updates that will help you and your customers better manage their online bookings. For starters, say hello to the new Customer Portal.
What is the Customer Portal?
The Customer Portal is apart of your booking page where your customers can log into their account and view their booking history, manage payment methods and easily update their contact information. Take a quick browse and see what the Customer Portal has in store for you and your customers.
There are two reasons why the Customer Portal is important for you and your business.
1. Self service is good for everyone!
In the past, if a customer needed to update their name, address, phone number etc with you, they would have to contact you in some form so you could update their information on behalf of them. Now, your customers can self service themselves within their own account. Nobody wants more work, Start Booking is here to make your life easier.
2. Packages, subscriptions and more coming soon!
Without the Customer Portal, we couldn’t enable you to provide packages or subscriptions to your customers because there hasn’t been a place for your customers to be able manage or use their purchases packages. With the new Customer Portal, you’ll soon be able to deliver packages and additional awesome features.
Additional Product Changes
In addition to the new Customer Portal, there are some additional changes that you’ll see within your account center. Review the additional product changes below.
Branding
The new branding section is where you will see the settings for uploading a logo and setting the colors that your account should use. For now, these colors will only affect your booking website but you can expect us to continue building out where these colors are incorporated.
Location
The settings for managing your location have been moved under the location tab. An important new setting for your location is the phone number setting. You can now set a phone number for your location that can be displayed on your booking page so customers can easily contact you.
Note: We will not use this number for any of our communications with you. It’s strictly for displaying to your customers as a way to contact your location.
Website
The website tab is replacing the Booking Channels tab where you previously would manage the settings of your old booking page. With the new website tab, you can manage the domain for your website as well as the pages and page content. (Including the Customer Portal)
Additional Information
If you’re an existing customer and want to learn what will happen with your previous booking page, read more about our migration overview.
If you’ve joined Start Booking after this release, no stress, theres nothing you need to do. You can learn more in Customer Portal overview.
What’s Next?
It’s only necessary to tease what’s coming in the near future!
Booking Packages
With packages from Start Booking, you’ll be able package your services or classes into a bundle and offer them at a discount. As mentioned above, your customers will be able to log into their Customer Portal and use their package credits to book again with you.
Apple and Android Apps
We are extremely excited to let you know that our native IOS (Apple) and Android apps are in the final stage of testing. As soon as we get through the different application processes we’ll be happy to let you know how to access and download each of the apps.