 Mark Demicoli | Mark Demicoli 6 November 2011 01:32:00 AM Santa's little helpers are at it again this year, with some great new features coming to ClickBook. Most prominently is the ability to select multiple services as part of a single booking, in a 'shopping cart' style. This is a long requested feature and will make for a valuable addition for your customers. Clients will be able to choose 'add-ons' to their standard services, and have the total price calculated as a single booking. We are also working to streamline the look and user friendliness of ClickBook. We've hired one of the best firms in the business to this end. Vizualise are hard at work right now coming up with a brand new look and refurbishing the whole booking process. Many more features are in the pipeworks, including a Facebook app, so stay tuned! Mark Demicoli 7 October 2011 01:14:33 AMI recently had a question regarding discounted services, and how there is a tendency for coupon holders (ie purchases via Groupon et al) to flood your ClickBook. While this may sound good on face value, experienced customers of ours don't recommend it. The danger is two-fold: 1. Concentrated period of lower cash flow with sometimes devastating ramifications; 2. Your prized, regular customers become alienated because they can never find available time as conveniently as they had come to expect. You can avoid this issue by segregating certain days or parts of days for discounted services. To do this, you must create your discounted services separate to your standard ones and place them in their own service category, such as "Groupon Massages" if you're a massage therapist. What we want to do now is segregate the availability for the discounted services. To do this, first make sure that no staff are selected as offering these services, as we are going to manage this from the TimeBlock function. Go to the Services tab, and check each of your newly created services to make sure no staff are selected. Alternately you can go into each staff member's profile and un-check all of the special discount services. Finally, we want to expose the discounted services for particular days and / or time ranges. Lets say Mondays only for this example. Create a new Available TimeBlock and assign date & duration appropriately - in this case it will be the first forthcoming Monday. In the Services section, select the discounted services. Save the TimeBlock and test it out using the Standard Services panel. If everything looks OK, you can repeat the TimeBlock so that it falls on each Monday. Easy peasey? Well, fairly so. Mark Demicoli 14 August 2011 11:58:06 AMIn a previous blog post, we introduced the recent phenomenon of Special Deal websites (the Groupons, LivingSocials, Spreets etc), and outlined some of the benefits and pitfalls. Many of you had unique perspectives and specific experiences with these services, both positive and negative. Today, I want to talk more about the issues and how we are working to get the best out of what is essentially a great idea, but has been found lacking by service-oriented businesses and independent therapists. Lets start with some practical news. Firstly, the trial has now been expanded to all locations. All members can now go to the new UnBooked tab and enable active discounting for 'unbooked' times. Many profiles will already have a discounting campaign enabled, however these will have a discounting level of 0%. You can change this to suit your needs as well as many other settings. Just to recap slightly, UnBooked.com takes a 9% commission for bringing you business. This is a pretty standard rate for referrals. We have worked closely with UnBooked over the last several months to create an automatic connection between ClickBook and UnBooked so that your 'unbooked' times are automatically published to UnBooked.com. Throughout this trial, there will be zero commission charged. This special is available exclusively to ClickBook members. 
The Groupon Business Model - One Size Fits All How much would you give for a rush of new customers? Well, Groupon and similar sites have the answer - and it seems on the high side if you're an established service provider. Fail to read the fine print, and you might find yourself drowning in legally binding cheap business, as some of ClickBook's members have reported. If you're new to your respective field and you desperately need customers, then it may indeed be a godsend. But what about the majority of businesses who find themselves somewhere in between?
The Reality Business Model What follows is a scenario which can only be achieved by having control over what and how much to discount, and importantly, when. "Joe" is a massage therapist. He's not new to the business, but does have some quite periods especially in January. Joe often thinks about sending a flyer to his customers before the January lull, but for a few years just hasn't been bothered to. He has however bothered to put up a "30% off in January sign" in the window, but it's dubious how many actually see it. Another concern he has is cancellations. Like many massage therapists, he often has 'no-shows' or cancelations for legitimate reasons. When Joe has a late cancellation, he is more likely to afford a greater discount because he's planned his day around being 'at the table', so he'd really like someone to turn up and would be almost prepared to put up a "30% off" sign in the window every time this happened. This can all be done quite easily now with ClickBook. However in this case, the 'window' is UnBooked.com, and the street is the entire internet. In Part 2, we'll get into the how-to of the new feature and what it means to 'balance your competitiveness'. Mark Demicoli 8 July 2011 12:13:44 PMSynchronisation between Google Calendar and ClickBook can now be achieved two-way, instead of just one-way as was the case previously. Full explanation, instructions and caveats (I'm afraid) are provided in the Subscription section of your Preferences. With this feature enabled ClickBook periodically checks your personal calendar in Google and creates 'not-available' TimeBlocks so that your ClickBook availability is constantly up-to-date. While on the subject, I'd like to re-iterate that synchronisation with Google Calendar is partially out of our control, since the frequency that Google updates Google Calendar subscriptions is a little random and undocumented. But we trust Google, right? The point is that you should always use ClickBook as your authoritative schedule, either by logging in or the Daily Forward Schedule email. When entering your private Google Calendar address, use the Private XML feed shown in the image below. To get to this page, sign-in to Google Calendar then click on Settings under My Calendars. A list of your calendars will be displayed. Click on the appropriate calendar link to open the settings page.  Mark Demicoli 7 June 2011 12:47:28 AM BitCoin is a revolutionary new internet currency that promises to make the money system far more honest and eliminate currency inflation (prices going up due to Governments and institutions creating large amounts of debt). How it does this is intriguing, and believe it or not, means no middle man (banks) and their exorbitant fees, unless you choose to store your BitCoins in a BitCoin storage service instead of keeping them safe yourself. We are so impressed by the technology that we've decided to accept negotiated payment for ClickBook subscriptions in BitCoins. If this sounds intriguing, here are few links to get you started. Basic Info: http://www.weusecoins.com/ More Info: https://en.bitcoin.it List of companies that accept BitCoins (growing fast): https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade If you are interested and have BitCoins to spend, please contact us to get the latest price for a 6 month or 12 month subscription on your chosen plan Questions? Go right ahead. Mark Demicoli 20 May 2011 12:48:01 AM You may have heard of UnBooked.com.
UnBooked.com is the world's first service to come up with an 'ideal' way of discounting services. We've all heard about 'special deal' sites like Groupon, services that demands that you commit a certain number of services at a certain discount, and be charged a certain percentage of the actual cost. We talked about this some weeks ago. It sure has some pros and cons. What UnBooked does is look at appointments from a different but complementary perspective to ClickBook. While ClickBook creates the tools to manage your appointments, UnBooked provides the platform to market those services, by allowing you to discount appointments during quiet times, when short-notice cancellations occur, and for specifically targeted campaigns. Over lunch a little while back, I met with the Directors of UnBooked and was blown away by their nous. They liked ClickBook, as well, and we decided that it was a marriage made in Silicone (computer chips). The result is that we have partnered to produce the world's first fully integrated Booking and Scheduling system and an exciting, new distributed marketing channel. Sounds like a bunch of hype? Let me put it simply: Imagine ClickBook could automatically discount cancelled appointments so that someone does actually show up, and possibly become a new long term client. Imagine you could use ClickBook to create marketing campaigns for a special seasons, such as Valentines Day, and enjoy seeing your listings appear in major newspapers in a special "UnBooked Deals" section. Imagine your booking system could automatically determine when you have quiet periods, and discount appointments to attract new customers. This is becoming a reality with the combination of the two services. We are now preparing to trial the system in Melbourne, Australia, with a view to rolling it out to the whole Aussie and US markets this year. To register your interest, Melbourne businesses should use the Contact Us form above. Media http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/deals/47731-clickbook-clicks-with-unbooked-integrated-booking-and-deals-service-looms Mark Demicoli 5 May 2011 11:17:23 AMWe couldn't keep it secret any longer because we're very excited about this new feature. It's been a long time coming and we have quite a big list of customers that have requested it. Intake forms, as you may well know, streamline the process of inducting new clients into your services, and keeping track of various information. The new feature will allow you to create any number of forms with Yes/No and free-text questions. Such forms can be of a general nature, or specific to certain service(s) or location(s). As you might expect if you've been using ClickBook for a while, all the smarts are taken care of behind the scenes. ClickBook will request clients to complete relevant forms, and enforce certain forms if you deem them mandatory, before they are able to make a booking. Ofcourse, this latter feature is optional.
Accurate, complete records. An additional option allows you to keep older versions of forms if the client changes details in one of their forms. It's time to start thinking NOW about how you can simplify your interactions by capturing as much information as possible before your client steps up. In the week ahead, we will provide a simple tutorial on how to get started. Mark Demicoli 29 March 2011 12:06:13 PMPreviously, ClickBook only allowed company-wide settings for the Appointment Start Interval and Custom Start Times. In this update, we show you how you can now set different intervals and custom-start-times for different staff members. This new feature makes it far more practical to set up staff members who have specific needs and service length. By default, all staff members inherit these settings from the main account. To customise these settings for a particular staff member: 1. Visit the Staff tab (as the Main Contact) and select the required staff member. 2. Expand the Appointment Start Times or Custom Start Times section depending on your requirements, and change settings appropriately. Don't forget to click Save Updates when you're done. Mark Demicoli 23 March 2011 05:05:46 PMAfter the last major update to the Booking Form, we fielded many complaints about the performance of the Client search, especially on handheld devices like the iPhone. (No we are still not officially supporting any handheld devices, however many users report that ClickBook works fine on the more recent iPhone and Android-based models). Well, we've basically re-written the way it works and should (theoretically) receive less complaints and more applause! The new version, instead of downloading ALL of your clients (when you sign-in and every time there is an update), does a real-time search in the background and reports the closest matches.  If you don't like the new Client List, you can easily switch back to the old one. So, what do you think? Mark Demicoli 20 March 2011 02:39:25 AM Many of us have seen it. A whole crop of new websites have emerged that let you create special deals with the promise of increased sales. Essentially, what we have here is a new breed of high-speed marketers who are using the power of the internet and social networking very effectively to sell products and services on your behalf at discounted rates, and take a commission from the proceeds. Anecdotally, we've seen many ClickBook service providers achieving 'booked out' status thanks to these services. Here are a few of the more popular sites: www.groupon.com www.livingsocial.com www.spreets.com (Australia) www.unbooked.com (Australia) Are you using these services? What has your experience been? |
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