MyBookingWizard is NOT a diary management system, we never set out to build a diary management system, and we have been constantly vigilant in avoiding diary managing activities. What we wanted to build was a marketing tool. Visitors to a website will want to use MBW, it’ll be easy, convenient and, damn it, enjoyable to use and therefore our clients will see a humongous increase in on-line conversion (not just hot-air, we’ve seen it happen).

It was in this spirit that when scoping the build of the project, we drew a very distinct line. We said that MBW will deal with iCalendar files. iCalendar is a standard diary format, most calender applications will import/export files in this format. So by using iCalendar files, MBW will not manage clients diaries, but will remain removed by simply sending booking info in a useful calendar format. It will be as intended; an exclusive booking application!

So we built MBW v0.9 and, as project manager, I presented it to the rest of the guys. During the presentation the discussion very soon went towards the problem with these iCalendar files. Basically, from the clients point of view, they are a ball ache! especially for clients who may not be tech savy. The need to send/receive and read/write iCalendar files suddenly appeared to be quite a large barrier to sale. BUT, that wasn’t the only problem… here is the funny bit!!

We were doing ‘diary management’. And I mean full on diary management! The bastard sneaked up on us! Here is how it worked: MBW displays ‘appointment slots’ to a visitor. Each slot needed to be previously defined in an iCalendar file by the client with all the details. So we had a database full of ‘slots’ and each slots location, attendee, attendee email, name, hair colour, age, number of guests, number of previous bookings. URGH!

It gets worse: Not only were we managing a diary for each client, but the only way a client could push changes to this diary, was by emailing an iCalendar file!!!! Not the best user interface. In fact, thinking about it, that aint good at all, that’s rubbish.

So I went away and thought about it: Where did we go wrong? I dunno, but we did come up with a dead good fix. Google Calendar! In the office we all have a Google apps account and we arrange our meetings and other events with Google Calendar, it’s actually a really good calendar application… Google calendar has an API – now we’re onto a winner. Google also released Free/Busy requests for the API in February. This was key! as we need to quickly discover free time to display slots to visitors.

Perfect. I went to boss and said, “we need a little over a week, and we can fix the iCalendar problem”, he said go for it and now we have myBookingWizard v1.0. What MBW does now is simple: Each client has a Google Calendar account, a customer clicks on ‘Book now’, MBW logs in to the client’s Google account, tells the visitor when the client is free, and books a slot for the visitor directly into the clients calendar. Brilliant!! Just what we were after!

Prices start at just £475 per month and until Autumn we’re offering a 50% early-adopter discount on the monthly fees until 2012 (terms apply).

myBookingWizard® – what’s it all about?

85% of people in the UK have used some sort of online booking system, yet very few companies actually offer this great facility. Why’s that?

Well, until now, good quality online booking systems have been beyond either the financial or technological reach of most companies. But that’s all changed.

myBookingWizard®, from Connected, is a hosted online booking solution with bags of bangs-per-buck for the forward-thinking SME.

A website ought to be a company’s most effective salesperson. With myBookingWizard® at your website’s core, your customers will have automated booking of events, appointments, meetings and actions at the click of a mouse. And with reservations made so simple, they’re far less likely to go elsewhere.

So what’s so special about myBookingWizard®?

Click here to read about the wizardry to set many a techy’s pulse racing.

The benefits to you and your business are listed below.

Simple pricing

There are no hidden extras, just a fully-supported and hosted solution from just £475 per month for myBookingWizard® Standard Edition. Upgrade and downgrade instantly and easily.

Proven and simple multi-stage booking process

We’re not asking you to be a guinea pig for our technology. This is a tried and tested booking platform that has so far notched up more than 50,000 appointments.

Highest conversion rate

We know that online bookings mean better enquiries from better people. So you’re guaranteed the highest complete conversion rate of any call-to-action.

Simple to add

With just two lines of code on your website, our hosted service is fast and easy to deploy with a choice of themes to fit your brand and logo.

Automated responders

myBookingWizard® saves you time and money against manual systems, with all emails and SMS handled automatically by the system, confirming bookings and sweeping up any failed or partial attempts along the way.

Standards-based

There’s no complicated new calendar system to master – myBookingWizard® uses the world’s most common format, which works with Outlook, Google Apps, Mac iCal, iPhone, iPad, WordPress, Thunderbird, Eudora, Drupal, Opera, 37Signals Backpack, Joomla, Facebook Events, Huddle, Lotus Notes, Windows Live and Yahoo Calendar.

Complete support

For complete peace of mind, our support community and forum is available 24/7, along with videos, hints and tips, ideas and UK-based telephone/Skype and email support.

Here is the current list of features we expect to be in the public version:

1. 4 stage booking process
2. Autoresponder email confirming place/date with details and map link (Google Maps) to location.
3. Automated SMS sent 1 day prior to appointment with link back to a client-defined page
4. iCalendar interface for adding bookings, sent via an ordinary email address
5. Standard choice of 3 themes
6. High-quality soft-erroring on all stages
7. Reporting, covering number of people entering/completing each stage
8. Remember function to recall visitor details for repeat bookings
9. FAQ /Helper system
10. EU compliant privacy policy
11. Custom defined contents/fields/text/images

We’re pretty excited about this new application as it will be the first of a new family of standalone VITES applications that can be installed and used by non-technical staffers. It’s going to be a breeze to install and we’re sure you’ll see myBookingWizard generating the highest quality enquiries and bookings possible. Get signed-up now. Or follow the release on Twitter.

Online Booking is one of the simplest and fastest ways to improve online conversion rates and give organisations a massive competitive advantage in sales and marketing.

How? By encouraging your clients to use the web to book their appointments you are changing the game by improving your visitors perception of your organisation and driving down the cost of acquisition. By letting your potential and returning clients book things themselves you benefit from:

• 24 x 7 booking – opens the window of booking and reduces the cost.
• Better information – vetting accurately the data online and getting the visitor to do all the data-entry work.
• Cool image – the improved customer journey is what they want. It’s a market-leader’s tool.
• Slicker diary management – let computing power and algorithms do the hard work.
• First class sales proposition – why not put it at the core of your product or service offering, would it make you unique?.
• Get online – moving your organisation further into the online world will increase it’s value.

More and more people expect to be able to book events and appointments online and implementing a simple system for the your web-site visitors will generate increased sales, fewer no-shows and higher quality clients. It is now the norm in many areas such as flight and hotel booking and in the years to come it will be viewed as a handicap if your organisation does not provide these basic services.

How does it work?

The OBS v1.5 provides an application that “pops-up” over your existing page (ala Facebook, Web 2.0 style) and gives the visitor a proven multi-stage process for booking events and appointments. The diary element of the OBS allows the visitor to see the next 6 weeks of available appointments in either calendar-style or list style. The visitor will be able to move forward or backward through weeks, months or available slots. Selecting a date causes the system to show the availability for that day and on selecting a slot they are taken to the next stage which asks for personal details.

Additional stages (both pre and post date and time selection) can be added for further refining of the available slots or providing qualification questions as either multiple choice or yes/no confirmation boxes. At every stage a “helper” is available that offloads the visitor into a “call-me-back” system to allow problematic situations to be dealt with.

On completion, OBS sends a customised confirmation email to the visitor and completes the booking with the back-end diary system. Should an error occur at this stage a custom page can be shown to offload the visitor into a different route for booking.

Additionally, should the OBS be unable to get live, get to Level 1 or level 2  ghost information, the system slips into a “fake” mode that looks like a real booking system but has an additional step at the end that advises the visitor that the booking is provisional and requires confirmation. Below you will find a typical step-by-step run-through of the process.

Data for the diary is typically held in a bespoke diary system (not provided) and three levels of diary synchronisation are available:

• Live booking. A bespoke API will gather live booking information from the back-end diary system. It is key that the back-end system has the capacity to deal with, for example, a request to pull every available slot for the next 2 months.
• Ghost Level 1. A periodic update from the back-end to the web-server is available to cache available slots and reduce the load on the back-end diary system. Typically this ghosting process will occur every 10-60 minutes depending on the number of slots available and the rate at which they are consumed.
• Ghost Level 2. Provides a local cache of available appointments every time an appointment is booked. This ensures that the online system can stay 100% in step with itself but does run the risk of getting out of step with appointments booked directly into the back-end.

Technology

Three core modules plus a number of associated plugins form the basis of the OBS

• Front-end interface; written in Javascript and XHTML using standard JQuery and Template Toolkit
• Back-end API, bespoke tailored for each client supporting SQL and most common database standards and SOAP interfaces. Written in PERL.
• Outbound communication API written in PERL supporting email senders such as CheetahMail, Communicator and SendMail plus a Call-me-Interface support Click to Call and most other commercial C2C systems.

The OBS application can be installed directly onto a LAMP server with some configuration or provided as a hosted service on Rackspace servers managed by Connected. Full reporting and alerting are available as plugin modules. Connected provide a range of services to help with the implementation of OBS from simple license-only deals to complete turnkey supply and management with consultancy.

OBS works on all major browser platforms including Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Flock. Information on mobile application support is available on request for iOS4 (iPhone & iPad) and Android. In line with many other software developers we do not support Internet Explorer 6. Why?

Come and talk to the experts in this field, contact Nick, Liam or Martin in sales or call us on 0845 051 4228.

All current versions of VITES (2.1, 2.4 and 3.0) support OBS v1.5. Implementation cost starts from around £5k, a typical configuration costs £25k. including consulting, design, deployment and 3 months support. All prices are excluding VAT. E & OE. Prices subject change, accurate as of Jan 1st 2010. For an up to date quote please contact Sales.

Here is a brief outline of what you can expect in the next release of the worlds first, commercially available, personalisation and customer journey platform

• Faster core platform, requiring less server computing power and faster serving of content
• In-built AB testing functions, faster, easier testing of content, pages and call-to-actions
• Server load balancing, giving higher system availability, improved fault tolerance and improved performance
• Off the shelf CMS support, de-skilling and speeding up changes to content
• Faster profile management, faster and easier creation of new customer journeys
• Reporting API, simplifying the export of business-critical data giving easier and faster access to real knowledge
• New User Group to support discussions, bug-tracking, feature request and cross-learning between clients

Initially released in 2006, VITES was designed to dramatically improve on and off site conversion rates by providing a scaleable platform that offered proper customer journey management (ala Amazon, Ebay etc) combined with a suite of testing tools that allowed accurate testing of new content, CTAs and traffic streams

Since it’s release, every client using the platform has seen at least a doubling of conversion rates and huge reductions in cost per enquiry/sale

The latest release is a ground-up rethink of what our clients and marketplace needed and part of this was a massive simplification in deployment of changes, testing and profiles

All current clients are on a migration plan to complete the porting to the new version by the end of 2010 and all new clients will automatically get the latest version of the platform

License charges remain unchanged, starting at just £500 per month for the basic 10k users per month version

Contact Liam, Martin or Nick now to find out more about how VITES 3.0 (Rangoon) can supercharge your web strategy.

VITES remains the only commercially available off the shelf journey profile and testing platform

Contact our licensing team (Liam, Martin or Nick) for further information.

System integrators and agencies should contact our CEO (Martin Dower) to discuss how VITES can help your clients

So why doesn’t every company use online booking?

Well, before I go into the challenges it’s worth highlighting that some organisations just cannot fit into automated appointment management or need quite high levels of human interaction to make that possible but assuming you don’t belong to this odd 1% lets have a look at some of the reasons organisations don’t use online booking.

Back-end legacy systems

For online booking (OBS) to work the web-front end has to talk regularly and reliably to your existing back-end systems. Many of these systems are simply not designed to do this. There are ways to step around the problem and put “middle-ware” systems in place but it’s not a strategic solution and could become a brake on the success of the project.

Planning and simplification is the key.

Not to say that all legacy back-end systems are bad, in fact many work really well if you modify your plan to take into the account the challenges. The art is to carefully specify what you need and want from an OBS system and aim for the 80:20 rule rather than discounting a system that can’t quite do everything last little thing you need. Bell and whistles can always be added later on and, when the OBS does show it’s success there is greater momentum and buy-in to fix legacy problems.

Not invented here

Sadly, this still pervades sales, marketing and call centres after all the 1990′s fears about “the Internet putting sales and marketing out of a job”. It doesn’t, quite the contrary. Implemented properly it will liberate sales & marketing to focus on interesting a valuable stuff. This can extend to executive management as they don’t properly understand the role that online booking systems play; insisting “on the personal touch” or “we’re a people company” or “our clients like to talk to real people”. These statements are all true. OBS systems are not trying to remove this personalisation, far from it; the systems should release people to have more meaningful conversations on a more personal level and remove the clunky “where and when and what” conversations completely.

No senior buy-in

Implementing an OBS initiative may involve some changes to company culture, operating practice and infrastructure. You must have buy-in from the top otherwise the initiative will almost always fail. The exec must understand what is trying to be achieved and this must be clearly communicated to everyone it touches.

Bloody hell, never thought of it

It is surprising how many organisations had actually never thought of using automated booking systems. Sometimes it’s as simple as the lack of understanding of how something that sounds so complicated could be applied. It could also be a case that the organisation is so drowning in it’s operational challenges that it never gets a chance to look up and innovate; these are the organisations that frequently benefit the most, as a good OBS implementation can not only turnaround struggling marketing campaigns, it can drive down the cost of sales, improve customer satisfaction and release corporate brains to start thinking again. Many clients we speak to fit into this category.

It ain’t broke

Just because you don’t use OBS now is not a reason to not use them in the future. Everyone in the industry is predicting an increased use of micro-applications and cross-platform systems. It’s coming and it’s coming fast; if you don’t catch the first wave of adoption then you may be out of business in a couple of years.

Barnes and Noble is the largest retail bookstore company in the US. It was pretty much last on the ladder for online sales and then e-books; each time citing “old wisdom” as to why these new upstart companies and technologies will not last. In January this year they had a massive lay-off plan and Amazon is touted as the best buyer of the struggling chain. First-in (usually) wins; last-in (always) loses.

Confusing product or service offering

Is the range of services and products so confusing that internal staff need a 1 week induction course to get there heads around it? OBS probably isn’t for you because you’re not going to be able to successfully let the man (or woman) on the street pick what he needs, where and when if it’s too complicated. It’s important to distinguish between confusing solutions and problems; you can easily simplify the OBS system by letting the visitors highlight their pain (i.e. what’s up?) and then let some algorithm do the hard work in terms of coming up with a solution. The other way to deal with this is to simplify your product offerings within the OBS, use Pareto’s rule and only deal with the products and services that really matter, or that make you most money or that are easiest to deal with online.

Fails the return on investment test

Implementing any automated system can be costly and the development cycle may be months or even years. If a business is only likely to do, say, £20k turnover using online booking then it’s going to take a fair old while to get your investment back. The real cost to implement online booking will start at around £5k and, depending on the complexity of systems involved could cost £50k+. Safe rule of thumb? If you expect less than £250k turnover pa from your online booking initiative then you can probably spend the money better elsewhere.

My current favourite is Online Booking Systems. They are wonderful at providing huge potential online without requiring the entire sales process to exist online.

We have a number of clients in the Healthcare sector; this fits the model particularly well.

Lets take a look at a typical client journey for, say, Laser Eye Surgery. I say “client” here, I should say “user” because that is what the t’interweb world calls clients or customer. I don’t like the word user and prefer to call them what they are so I won’t apologise in advance for the confusion it might cause.

The Journey

• INTERESTED. A potential customer has their interest pricked in having Laser Eye Surgery. So much so they decide to find out more. They will hear anecdotal stories from mates, work colleagues and the press. Hell, they might even see a TV advert (if they watch day-time TV). Interest starts with an Internet search so off we go and Google “laser eye surgery“. Lots of results, a few companies seem to dominate the space, a few clicks later and bingo we’re off and running and looking around companies, articles, blogs and forums.

• WANT MORE. I’m kind of happy that this “laser eye surgery” might just suit me, I’m a little happier that they may be able to treat me after I’ve checked the “Am I suitable application”. Maybe more information and talk it over with the wife, it’s not cheap! Lets fill in an information request. 2 days later information pack drops through the door. Wahey, this does look good, just need to have one of those “free consultations” they all talk about. Now when is the best time to sort that out? and where do I need to go?

STOP As a visitor I am now at a very critical stage in my client journey. I’ve started my cycle online but now I need to phone a call centre, they’ll ask me questions I won’t have answers to. Besides, why do I want to talk to a call centre at all. Without online booking what we have now found is that the client journey has to continue offline and that is fraught with cost (for the supplier), convenience issues (for all), call-centre economics (call-queues, press 1 to, speaking to faceless people, busy tones, call backs, human errors, urgh). All that good work so far is now left in the hands of a call-centre bod who’s targeted to clear 100 calls per shift at an average of 1m30s per call and a “close rate” of 20%.

ENTER ONLINE BOOKING My journey can now continue, at my pace, when I want to and when I want to. As the visitor, I am still in control. Back into the journey we go.

• VERY INTERESTED. Lets book online. I can check my diary against what’s available, I can move meetings around. I can try different days or even different clinics as I work in London but live in Guildford. If I’m not sure I can halt my booking halfway through and come back a day of two later to continue the process. This is rather nice and I get to do this “all on my own terms”. yes, I’ve got to answer odd questions about my medical history but I’d expect that anyway. Ace, I’m booked in.

• COUNTDOWN. Only got a week before my consultation, I’m being sent maps, parking locations, information about my consult day, what I need to do before hand. All automatically, all sitting in my Inbox in Googlemail, Facebook, LinkedIn or wherever I want it sent. A nice SMS text arrives the day before with local links I can click to see maps on my mobile when I’m actually visiting the clinic.

The journey is not over for me, I still need to discuss this further; look into the pro and cons and decide at some point. In fact it might take me a year or so to pluck up the courage and save the money for the operation so I’m still going to wander around the web looking at stuff. What’s nice is that when I go back to Company X, they remember me! they remember that I had a consultation and now they are showing me stuff that’s useful for me. Better still, 1 year later they advise me that I’ll need another consultation as my prescription may have changed. They know which clinic I went to and when I prefer my appointments to be so they make suggestions on the web site, all I need to do it click to confirm. That’s easy and I’m back for a consultation a year later and now I decide to to go ahead.

Now I’ve become a customer, a real client. Finally, I’ve been able to book my treatment directly online, where I want and when I want. I have spoken to people, I’ve met the lovely girl who did my consultations (both of them actually, they remembered who did my first one when I booked my second one). I spoke to the surgeon and I think I spoke to the call centre once to confirm some details that were not quite right during the online booking process.

A beautiful journey, beautifully executed. It’s what t’interweb was invented for.

These are all questions typically running around marketing departments at the moment and the stock answer is to “get a new one designed” on the basis that it must be better than the old one as it’s newer and we’ve learned things (have we?) about the current versions of the landing pages.

Trial and error economics

Don’t guess, don’t risk the return on the heavy-lifters. Your current series of pages act as a ‘banker’ – put simply the new stuff has to race the best of the best you have already. When testing the new pages against the current bankers use a reliable testing method (such as the null hypothesis) that gives results you can be confident in. If you can be confident in the results then you can queue up hundreds of ideas to be tested and leave the testing harness to do the hard work or evaluating the changes.

The risk is low because:

• Pages that perform a lot worse than the banker will show up as failing very quickly and can be removed from the test quickly.
• Pages that perform a lot better than the banker will show up as succeeding very quickly and can replace the banker quickly.
• Pages that perform similarly will take a lot longer to determine their value but as they are not hurting (or helping) the conversion rate there is no loss associated with leaving them in test except the loss of the opportunity to run another test.
• Testing small changes can help with specific learning. For example, the data-entry form might perform better with a solid blue background versus white. This is real learning and can be applied (after testing) across other landing pages.

In fact, taken as a continuous process (Kaizen) optimising the landing pages can be the easiest and fastest way to continually improve a site, although not very glamorous for a marketing department.

About VITES™ as a testing tool

Split testing using the null hypothesis is built-into the core of VITES™ and offers a fast, reliable and repeatable test harness. Testing can be done via profile, traffic type, campaign or any other superset of visitor data (postcode range, for example) and is not limited to A/B testing with support for 26 concurrent tests running in each profile.  Traffic can be split in any range, typically the fastest results are achieved using a 50:50 ratio in an A/B test but 80:20 tests are commonly used when clients are nervous about radical changes to high net-worth landing pages.

The results were stunning (for 2001) and showed that 80% of the advertising spend was pretty poor indeed. Not surprisingly our client was over the moon with this new-found transparency and their business exploded when they invested in the right online advertising and had faith in the value of it. It was a real way to measure the actual return on advertising investment.

VITES™ 1.0

Born in the middle of 2003, this was the first time page content was linked to data recorded. It was clear that first time visitors to a website needed to be encouraged to return to generate revenue, and that returning visitors to the website needed to be treated differently to first timers. So a simple “tunneling system” was implemented that established where the visitor was in the sales cycle by understanding their previous activity on the website and also by interrogating the offline CRM system.

By doing this, VITES™ dropped people into the most appropriate tunnel and fed them tunnel specific content, imagery and, most importantly, applications.

Conversion rates rocketed. We had stumbled across a killer application for the web. In much the same way as Sergey Brin devised a method at Stanford University to “rank” sites in importance based on inbound links – which then became the basis for Google – we stumbled upon the link between recording and behaviour and predictive purchasing or behavioural targeting was born.

VITES™ 1.5

The original version was a killer. It doubled conversion rates overnight but it was very cumbersome to build sites around it and the clunky tunnels were flawed when it came to bookmarking and search engine maps. This needed addressing so a specification to improve the whole system was hastily put together in 2004 to meet these shortcomings.

This was a simpler beast to operate, more flexible, more powerful but still required hand cutting of the tunnels. We had tunnel vision!

VITES™ 2.x

A huge step in development was identified in late 2005 and the move to visitor profiles is set in stone. The whole system needed to be rewritten and was completed by the middle of 2006. This included a number of innovations including profiles, rules and confidence ratings (how confident the system is that a person fits a profile).

The latest platform is developed was the established LAMP platform and the task of rolling it out to the first handful of clients started.

The tool

Soon after VITES™ 2.x was launched it was realised that customers were coming up with great ways in which to use this tool. It became a very natural and easy tool to customise web content so sites could change at the weekend or overnight or when the call centre was busy or any other internal or external event.

Market leading online advertising companies became exposed to the technology and started sharing their data with VITES™ allowing it to make better decisions. We’ve only just scratched the surface with the VITES™ tool – there are a hundred or even a thousand more uses for it that we are yet to find.