16. Januar. 2015 | von Christopher Rudolf

During the company restructuring from "zeitfest GmbH" to "Belbo Business Software GmbH", so much has happened around zeitfest that we are publishing these changes here on the blog. We want to keep you up to date and distinguish between "New Features", "Improved Features", "Notes" and "Bug Fixes".

New Features

Call Tracking with the Belbo Box

Our first piece of hardware is probably the most important new development, which is designed to make your appointment scheduling even faster and easier. Once connected in the salon or studio, the box transmits all incoming calls to your calendar. This allows you to cross-reference incoming calls with your customer database and thus help the customer faster without having to look up anything.

If a calling number is still unknown in the customer database, you can use the notification that appears in the calendar to transfer the phone number to an appointment, thus saving yourself from typing it from the display! Particularly here, you will experience tremendous time savings and a reduction in the probability of errors.

The Belbo Box costs one-time 149.90 euros including shipping and plus VAT.

Special thanks go to Daniel Weber for the thorough testing and excellent feedback!

Requirement: You must manage your telephone connection in your salon or studio via a Fritz Box. If you do not use a Fritz Box in your salon or studio, it is possible to purchase and connect a Fritz Box.

Loyalty Cards

From now on, you can define your own loyalty program and manage it in your calendar. This way, everything stays in one place. Currently, you can define stamp and sales cards that can be assigned to customers. With each visit, you can then stamp the customer record and keep track of when the next bonus is due for the customer.

Contract Management

For gym owners, we have added contract management to the features. Each customer can be assigned a contract through this function, which has a term and a number of trainings. After each training session, a training can then be crossed off from the contract or if an appointment is missed, a missed appointment can also be recorded.

Multiple Bookable Persons per Appointment

Especially suitable for salons with cutting and color specialists, this feature allows end customers to select different employees in online booking. Using the concept of booking groups, you can define which products customers are allowed to select their own employees for. This allows regular customers in particular to achieve perfect online scheduling.

Appointment Fields

In addition to customer fields, appointment-specific fields can now also be created. This is useful for storing more detailed information about which treatment or which products in what dosage were applied.

Improved Features

Text Editing Tool

All text editing elements have been replaced with a new, simpler editing module. With this, you can more easily establish texts and links that should appear in your online booking or in your emails. The "Text Placeholders" section contains a list of usable placeholders for the specific text.

Email Function

Each location can now be assigned an email address. If the online booking notification option "Send notification to location" is active, emails will be sent with a reply address from the location. This allows owners of multiple salons to directly assign customer responses to the correct location. All persons involved in the appointment will be mentioned in the email.

Waiting List

The customer's appointment request is now displayed in the calendar including selected services. Furthermore, the total number of appointment requests now appears in the calendar at the top right.

Internationalization

Appointment confirmations and reminders are sent in the language that the customer used during registration or last switched to

Customer Profiles

After successful registration, customers can now independently delete themselves. This is done in the Profile tab. Furthermore, it is possible there to change their email address. For this, the new email address must first be added and confirmed. Then the new email address can be selected as the new primary email address.

Employee Profiles

Employees can now change their email address. For this, the respective employee must log in and go to their profile. There they can store a new email address analogous to the customer profile and, after confirmation, convert it to their new primary email address. Furthermore, a landline number can now also be stored for each employee with their own login.

Warning for Invalid Phone Number or Email Address

If a reminder SMS or email could not be delivered, the employee receives a notification at the next appointment scheduling informing them that this information is incorrect. The employee then has a direct opportunity (since they are just scheduling the appointment for the customer) to cross-check the data.

Time Scheduling Option

If an employee also performs the previous time step, a time adjustment of the current step can now be made. This is suitable, for example, for hairdressers precisely when, for example, an assistant or the stylist applies the color and then the assistant always performs a beauty consultation afterwards. In this case, the assistant can work much faster if she is already applying the color to the customer.

Free Text Message in Online Booking

It is now possible to block the free text message in online booking. This is intended to prevent customers from potentially adding appointment-specific requirements that they could have fulfilled themselves.

New Synchronization Options Between Locations

In addition to services and online booking processes, absences and email templates can now also be synchronized between locations.

Employee Order in Online Booking

Previously, the employee order in online booking could not be customized separately. Now this can be defined independently of the calendar order. In the "Online Booking" -> "Order" -> "Employees" section, you can freely rearrange the online bookable employees.

Employee Role

The employee role serves to group employees according to competencies and prices. We have extended this grouping with the following properties:

• Collection role for departed employees. Departed employees are no longer offered for appointment rescheduling and are hidden by default in the schedule. If needed, the departed employee can be actively displayed in the calendar.
• Color: An employee without a color now "inherits" the color of their role. This minimizes configuration effort for many employees.
• Employee invisible: Employees of a role are not displayed in the booking process.

Strict Location Mode

The new strict location mode allows you to explicitly control which stores a customer is allowed to book appointments in. After activating this option, there is a new section for each customer in the customer file for the assigned locations.

Notes

• In the schedule, working times can be copied directly from the week overview from one employee to another or to another day by clicking on the working time with the mouse, holding it down, moving the mouse to the target day and releasing it.
• Marketing tools have been moved to the main menu of customers.
• The news from the iPhone app have been moved to marketing tools.
• The properties "Email Footer", "Customer must accept T&Cs", "Reply Email Address", "Free Text on Booking", "Price Notice" are now location-specific and not account-specific.
• The online booking options have been restructured to make it faster and easier to find the desired function. We distinguish between options that relate to registration, appointment rhythm, appointment offer, and time limits. Please note that we are constantly working on the placement and naming of configuration options, as we consider the complexity of configuration variety to be a central problem and we want to continuously help you find already implemented functions more quickly.
• You will receive notifications about undelivered SMS and emails if active in the configuration.
• In the global settings, you can view the status of the Belbo licenses and configure them if necessary.

Bug Fixes

• A bug was fixed that caused no readable error message to appear when a customer books an appointment without registration and makes an input error.
• A bug was fixed that caused the calendar to appear to load forever when no employees were available for display.
• A bug was fixed that caused the calendar to jump back one day after editing an employee profile from the calendar.
• A bug was fixed that caused prices to be moved and not copied when transferring a service from one location to another.
• A bug was fixed that caused a product's time schedule to not be editable if no prices had been assigned to the product yet.
• A bug was fixed that prevented an employee from being transferred from one location to another.
• A vulnerability was fixed that made it possible to determine from outside the number of already booked appointments.
• A bug was fixed that prevented tasks from being moved to another day.
• A performance issue was fixed that caused online booking of many products and the "Any Employee" option to take particularly long.
• A performance issue was fixed that caused the schedule to display very slowly.
• A bug was fixed that caused the calendar in the background to jump away after selecting a time in the appointment assistant.
• A bug was fixed that could cause no prices to appear in the appointment for an employee-independent booking.
• A bug was fixed that caused the wrong booking label to be selected in the iPhone app for a multilingual account.
• A bug was fixed that caused no names to be displayed in the calendar if the "First Name Last Name" option was selected.
• A display error in the employee selection was fixed that caused the order of roles not to match the order in the employee role table.