Booking Notifications

Marlin Tyre and Mechanical Workshop Software's booking notifications function enables businesses to update customers about their bookings via sms or email.

Confirmation notifications can be sent whenever a new booking is added, or when the Time, Contact or Vehicle information for an existing booking is edited.

Reminder notifications can also be sent a specified number of days (up to a week) before a booking is due to take place.

Editing Booking Notifications

There are four different types of booking notifications:

• New Booking Confirmations are sent when a new booking is first saved;
• Changed Booking Confirmations are sent when a booking is updated;
• New Booking Reminders are sent a specified number of days prior to the booking;
• Changed Booking Reminders are sent a specified number of days prior to the booking when a previous reminder has been sent.

Email and sms templates (which do not exceed character limits) can be set for each booking notification type, by editing the relevant Planner.BookingNotifications enterprise setting.

To assign a template to a booking notification type, first create the template in the Customer Message Templates module, then use the relevant picker to assign the template to the appropriate notification type.

The default number of days before a booking that reminder notifications are sent out is two, but can also be set by editing the Planner.ReminderDaysBeforeBooking company email setting.

Sending Booking Notifications

Business Planner

Whenever a booking is first saved or the Time, Contact or Vehicle of an existing booking is edited, the Booking Notifications pop-up window will open, prompting the user to send a booking notification to the customer.

The upper section of the Booking Notification pop-up shows the Contact and Vehicle information for the booking.

The contact method for the notification messages can be set using the Notification Method drop-down, with the selected contact method details being shown in the field to the right.

By default the Confirmation and Reminder checkboxes below will be ticked.

Select whether to immediately send a booking confirmation to the customer, via the selected notification method, by ticking or unticking the Confirmation checkbox.

Select whether to send a booking reminder to the customer at a later date, via the selected notification method, by ticking or unticking the Reminder checkbox.

Leave the Reminder checkbox ticked to queue another message to be sent the specified number of days prior to the booking date.

The drop-down menu to the right can then be used to specify how many days before their booking the reminder notification should be sent.

To send the confirmation notification and/or schedule the booking reminder, click on the Ok button at the bottom-right of the pop-up.

Unticking both the Confirmation and Reminder checkboxes and clicking on the OK button will not send any notifications.

Clicking Cancel in the Booking Notifications pop-up window will maintain the changes to the booking but not send any notifications to the customer.

A ? icon will appear in the Task List's new Notified column for the booking, indicating that changes have been made without notifying the customer and users will continue to be prompted to send notifications whenever changes are made to the booking.

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Viewing Booking Notifications

Business Planner > [Booking]

Sent booking notifications, including queued reminders, can be viewed by opening the relevant booking and clicking on the Outbox tab of the Edit details window.

Specific message details can be viewed by double clicking on the relevant notification.

Booking Notification Methods

Master Files > Customers > Customers > [Customer]

The Contact Methods lists at the bottom of Customer Master File Details tab now contains Allow Booking Notifications and Preferred Booking Notification columns, which can be used to set the contact methods used for their booking notifications.

The Allow Booking Notifications and Preferred Booking Notification columns only contain checkboxes for Mobile or Email contact method types.

To enable booking notifications to be sent using a contact method, tick the relevant Allow Booking Notifications checkbox.

To specify a contact method as the preferred booking notification method, tick the relevant Preferred Booking Notification checkbox.