MailChimp is one of the best email marketing services out there – in fact, we use it here at Timely for our own newsletters. It let’s you manage your customer mailing lists and design beautiful looking newsletters. It also provides advanced tracking – you can see who has opened your newsletter, what links they clicked, and so on.

So how does the integration work?

In a nutshell, we take away all the complexity of managing customer contacts in MailChimp. When the integration is first turned on, we automatically populate your customers to a mailing list in MailChimp. Then, whenever you add, modify or delete customers we automatically sync those changes back to MailChimp for you.

We also do some clever things like sending through additional fields for your contacts that you can filter on: customers total spend, time since last booking, date of birth, etc. Using these fields, you can target specific segments of your customer base – e.g. send a special offer to customers who haven’t visited you for 6 months.

For more information check out our MailChimp help page.

A NZ Hi-Tech Award is one of the technology sector’s most sought-after accolades. They have been awarded over the years to New Zealand’s most successful high-tech companies, and highest achieving individuals.

Here’s a pic from the announcement event in Wellington:

The next stage involves questions from a panel of judges including Apple Computer founder Steve Wozniak and the winner will be announced at a black-tie event held at Skycity on the 17th of May.

Wish us luck!

Skip ahead “x” weeks

We’ve added two handy drop-downs to the calendar header allowing you to skip back/forward by set intervals of time. This is especially handy if you are using the “book next” function. For example, if the customer is at point-of-sale and wants to book their next appointment in 4 weeks time then you can simply click the appointment, choose “book next” and then skip ahead 4 weeks by using the drop-down.

Auto-search for customer

This is a real time-saver. When you are searching for customers from the Customers tab, we’ll auto-search for customers “on-the-fly”. In other words, as you are typing the results list will automatically update:

Once you’ve narrowed your search down to a specific customer we’ll automatically load the customer details in the right pane:

Print details of an individual appointment

Click this button to download a PDF file containing all the details of the selected appointment:

Other improvements

• We’ve added data for classes to the Business Summary and Future Value reports
• The calendar date picker works a lot better on the mobile version of Timely for Windows Phones
• Added a custom MailChimp field to customers that is fed through to MailChimp as an attribute that can be filtered on
• Improved the JavaScript used for the online booking plugin.

Before we jump into the details, we wanted you to know that we’ve been working on a better way of communicating these new features to you. The main change will see us announcing new functionality and/or important notices within the Timely system itself – a notification will appear on the navigation bar and you’ll be able to see what’s new and then dismiss the notification. We’ll be introducing this in the next month or so.

In the meantime, here is what we’ve recently added to the system:

Improved mobile version

In case you didn’t know we have a mobile version of Timely at http://m.gettimely.com. We’ve just made a bunch of changes to the user interface so that it works better on a wider range of smartphones – including Windows Phone.

Figure 1 – new navigation
Figure 2 – menu slides in from the left
Figure 3 – updated user interface to work on a wider range of devices

Revised date selector

The date selector on the calendar now shows two months instead of just one month

Google Analytics for online bookings

Google Analytics is a great tool to use on your website to see where your customers are coming from and what they are looking at on your website. And now that we’ve added support for Google Analytics to the online booking process, you can get greater insight into your customers web activity. It couldn’t be easier to setup either – just go to Promote > Google Analytics and follow the instructions from there.

Staff roster report

Go to the Reports menu and choose “Staff Roster” to print off a roster sheet for your staff . Filter by date range, staff, location and then stick it on the wall so everyone knows when they are working! If you haven’t used the roster function before you’ll find it under Settings > Roster. Its a great wee tool to manage vacations, sick days, etc.

Print off a list of customers attending your classes

This handy report is great for checking off who attended a class, confirming contact details and adding your own notes. You can access this report by clicking a class on the calendar and choosing “Print list”

Other changes

• We’ve made the non-working hours on the calendar darker so they stand out better
• The customers section will now remember the last customer you viewed. Great if you’re switching between calendar and customer screens a lot

Coming up

• Two-way SMS in Australia and the U.S.A.
• MailChimp integration
• Recurring classes / recurring class attendees
• Notifications/announcements of new features inside the app

To date, when a customer books online they can select a specific staff member, or select “no preference”. If they select “no preference” – the online booking calendar will display combined availability of all of your staff. When the booking is made the system will automatically select a staff member based on availability.

We had some feedback  asking if we can remove this “no preference” option and require that the customer always selects the specific staff member for their appointment. And we listened. And now you can!

You will find the new setting under Settings > General settings > Online booking settings. When you turn this on, the customer will be required to select a specific staff member when they make an online booking:

Some tips:

• Think about your customers before you turn this option on. It is easier for them to make a booking when the “no preference” option is available. But if it suits your business better to force them to select a staff member, go right ahead and turn this new option on!
• To make the selection of a staff member easier for your customers – make sure you fill out the info for each of your staff members including their job title, bio and photo. You’ll find this under Settings > Staff > Details.

In future we are also looking at options for how a staff member is selected when the “no preference” option is used. How would you like to see the bookings assigned to staff members? Do you have a “pecking order”, or would you like it to be random, or evenly distributed amongst your team. Let us know!

1. Set up your classes:

Go to Settings > Services and click the Add Class button:

Enter the details of your new Class and click Save:

Tips:

• Add a color for your new classes so you can easily distinguish them on your calendar
• Add a category for your classes

2. Schedule a class:

Go to the Calendar tab and click where you want to add the class:

Choose which of your classes is at this time:

Add your customers and click Save:

And your done! Do this for each of your classes to build up your timetable:

Timely will send out email and SMS notifications and reminders as per the settings you have selected for these:

More to come soon!

This first version covers the basics of the classes/group functionality, including a lot of work “behind the scenes” to make it solid. But we know there are a few things you still need, so here’s what we’re working on next, in order:

Recurring classes

If you have a regular schedule/timetable of classes and customers, we are next going to add a feature so you can set this up once using recurring classes. For now though, you’ll need to add your classes and customers individually as per the above. To vote or comment on this feature and be notified when it is ready – go here.

Online bookings

So your customers can book themselves in and out of classes online themselves. To vote or comment on this feature and be notified when it is ready - go here.

Xero integration

The ability to generate invoices for class attendess in the same way you can curently for individual appointments

Vend integration

For processing your class attendees payments at point of sale via Vend in the same way you can curently for individual appointments

Mobile app support

Currently classes can only be viewed in the mobile app, and not edited. We will add full support for managing classes to the mobile app.

Have your say

Thanks to all of you who have been providing feedback and suggestions on the classes feature so far. Now is your chance to help us refine the class booking functionality even further – so keep those suggestions coming!

What do you think of what we’ve done so far?

1. The best appointment scheduling system possible, to make your lives easier; and
2. Features and tools that actively help you get new customers through the door.

Today we are stoked to launch a new tool for you to get those online bookings flooding in from the world’s most popular social channel, Facebook.

By adding a Book Now button to your Facebook page – your customers have another easy and convenient way to make an appointment with you.

Adding the button to your Facebook page couldn’t be easier. Just head over to Promote > Facebook app and click the massive green button!

Here’s an example of how the button will look on your Facebook page:

And when customers hit the “Book Now” button they go straight into making an appointment with you without leaving Facebook:

Enjoy!

This is great news for businesses that want to:

• Stay engaged with their customers rather than sending a one-way message
• Save time by allowing customers to confirm their own appointments rather than chasing up each individual customer by phone, SMS or email

SMS replies

You can turn on SMS replies by going to Settings > General settings > Notification and reminder settings > Two-way messaging

When SMS replies are enabled you’ll notice a new Received option in the Messages tab:

This allows you to view all the SMS replies that have been sent to you. You can toggle between Received and Sent messages and you can search for specific messages by entering the customers name or mobile number.

You’ll also notice that when you get new messages we’ll alert you by showing a counter on the Messages tab. This is updated as soon as message is received and is cleared once you have viewed the new messages.

Allowing customers to confirm their own appointment

Another new feature is the ability for customers to confirm their appointment when they are sent an SMS or email reminder. You can activate this feature by going to Settings > General settings > Notification and reminder settings and under the Two-way messaging section click Allow customers to confirm pencilled-in appointments when sent a reminder. 

Notice that this setting only applies to pencilled-in (e.g. tentative) appointments. If you add a confirmed appointment to the calendar the customer will still be sent a reminder but won’t have the ability to confirm it.

For this reason we recommend that you also turn on Make pencilled-in the default status for new appointments. Appointments will then be added to the calendar as pencilled-in…

… and the customer will then be sent an SMS reminder that looks like this:

Hi John, This is a friendly reminder of your appointment with Doe Day Spa on Sat, 19 Jan at 3:10 PM. Text ‘Y’ to confirm or call (01) 234 5678 to change.

When the customer replies back with ‘Y’ the appointment on the calendar will change to…

… and the SMS reply will register in the Received messages section like this:

Pretty neat huh?

We’ve also added a Confirm my appointment button to email reminders. This automatically confirms the appointment when clicked on.

Costing for SMS replies

Each SMS reply costs 0.5 credits and will automatically be deducted from your SMS balance. There is no charge for email reminders.

This update includes a ton of improvements and we’ve also added a bunch of completely new features – including the ability to merge customers.

The full list of changes include:

• Improved searching of customers
• Ability to scroll through long lists of customers
• Split customers details into three tabs – summary, details and appointments. Summary view includes  most recent appointment and next upcoming appointment
• Past and future appointments are separated out
• Cancelled appointments now showing
• Ability to add an appointment with the appointment details pre-populated when you click a time on the calendar
• Merge function to combine two customer records (e.g. duplicate customers)
• Improved user interface with changes in different areas automatically kept in sync
• Delete confirmation added
• Clicking the edit customer link on the calendar link takes you directly to the customers summary page

Massive shout-out to our own Willy B. who has been labouring over this project for the last few weeks.

November-December 2012

Ryan Baker and his co-founder Andrew Schofield have more than a decade of experience building online booking tools.

The pair founded a similar website, bookit.co.nz, which was acquired by TradeMe in 2010.

“We looked at the services space a couple of years ago and saw it was not well serviced with a quality appointment booking system. Our plan is to out-execute the competition with world-class software.”

Read the full article