#1
Is the status of your booking updated? Make sure to always change the status of all your new enquiries by clicking on the red TAKE label. This will change the status from new to in progress. This is an important alert for any other users that you are now dealing with the enquiry. Do note this will not send anything to the guest.
#2
Keep track of what is happening with your enquiries. Get into the habit of attaching at least one booking label to your In Progress enquiries. This is the crux of helping you convert provisional bookings and can save you so much time by instantly seeing what stage the booking is at.
Along with labelling your Enquiries, you can also set Follow-Ups for yourself so the system can remind you to chase customers.
i.e. if you’re awaiting a deposit from a customer, you can create a label called ‘Awaiting Deposit’ which you can label the enquiry with. Then set a ‘Follow-up’ for a future date. On that day in your Enquiries page, check your Notification Centre, Follow-Up Required, here will lie a list of your Reminders for that day, treat it like your ‘To-do list’.
#3
Provisionally hold and place confirmed bookings on tables. If you take auto-confirm bookings alongside enquiries, remember to always assign a booking into a table within the venue. By assigning a booking to a table as soon as you confirm it with the customer, this will save you from double-booking areas. If you regularly book out a group of tables as an ‘Area’ you can set up the Area as a Zone in your Admin.
If a booking has not been assigned to a table, you will be warned within the Diary page in the Unassigned section at the top of the page or by an empty orange box alongside the customer’s booking on the left-hand side check-in list in the Diary and Floorplan.
#4
Keep an eye on today’s enquiries. If you have enquiries open throughout the day, make sure to check the notifications centre’s section called TODAY’S ENQUIRIES. This should be treated as top priority to get dealt with (confirmed or rejected) otherwise the enquiry will be marked as LOST. To change the status, make sure to hit either CONFIRM and SAVE or REJECT and SAVE within the enquiry page:
Don't forget to send a confirmation/cancellation email to the customer when the booking is confirmed/rejected. By default, the system will NOT automatically send an email to the customer unless you have specifically set it to do so within the settings for the booking type. To send an email to the customer, head to the Messages tab within the booking/enquiry > click COMPOSE EMAIL and under TYPE OF EMAIL choose the relevant template to send:
If you would like to set up automatic emails, please see our handy guide here for automatic confirmation emails and here for cancellation emails.
#5
Keep checking Collins for new alerts and notifications. Keep an eye on your Notification centre within the Enquiries page and keep it up to date, so you are always on top on new alerts! You can either clear all notifications from the Enquiries page or within the customer’s individual enquiry as detailed in this guide.
Useful tip - If you have Auto-confirm setup, do make sure to regularly check 'Auto-confirmed Notes' alerts. These are any notes that the customer wrote in the Special Requests box at the time of booking.
#6
Save time by always having email templates ready to send. To save you a lot of time when managing your enquiries, you can create Email Templates of messages that you regularly copy & paste into emails i.e. Terms and Conditions, Confirmed Message, Fully Booked Message etc plus you can add attachments like Menus, pictures, leaflets etc to your system. When you create an email (Messages tab > Compose Email) you will have two fields with drop-down boxes containing all your ‘Attachments’ and ‘Predefined messages’ so you can easily attach/insert into the body of the email.
#7
Keep on top of your customer details and regulars. Use your 'Find a Customer' tool to quickly find details of guests that have been with you before. When adding a new enquiry/booking, if you put their name/email address or phone number in the 'Find a Customer' field, Collins will bring up any records matching the search and if you then select it, it will generate their details for you, making it super fast to add their booking in!
Please see our guide here on how to see the Find a Customer section in the Enquiries page and here on how to find customer details in the Diary/Floorplan/Runsheet.
The system will also display a ‘Customer Profile’ with any customer labels, DOB, any comments about the customer i.e. No show/Previous complaint/Likes Table 2, and if they have any past or future bookings this will display at the bottom of the profile.
#8
Make sure the team knows what bookings are coming in. To see a list of your Bookings for that day, you can print off two types of Runsheets from your Diary and Runsheet pages.
If you are entering runsheet notes, pre-orders and payments on bookings regularly then you’ll need to print off your Customised Runsheet - this then gives you tick box options of all the details you can see on this. To make your life easier, you can also preset what sections are automatically included in your runsheets daily, to save you time ticking them each time.
If you don’t need to see much information and simply want to print off a nice shortlist of bookings in order of Arrival Time, download your Short Runsheet.