March 2008 Developments...... what would you like?

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Permalink Reply by Peter Collingsworth on March 1, 2008 at 3:54pm

Alex you did ask so here goes:

Alex the most import things for us as a company are (In order of priority) It would be great to see what everyone’s priorities also are and then as a community we could agree some sort of order and hopefully some time scales:

1/ Enquiry system

• All enquires are set up on Tour CMS and given a number which if and when moves to the next stages, quotation, provisional and confirmed the same numbers follows through the process.
• Expansion of your tracking where by like a booking form we can create an enquiry form or forms which capture where the enquiry came from. (Google, affiliate programs etc) Then automatically create this as a new enquiry within TCMS (Note it would have to check that the customer does not all ready exist and if they do assign the new enquiry status in the same way we would a quotation against a customers profile.
• What would be very nice is the option on receipt of a new enquiry, instead of a flag appearing in all users informing of a new enquiry. Is that it is only received by members of staff who looked after a collection. This way companies could either by country or individual tour set up collections for different members of staff, ensuring that our hard earned enquiries actually go to the most appropriate staff members maximizing conversions.

2/ Workflow

• To be able to create our own tick boxes.
• The name of the tick box to be a hyperlink to a comments box informing staff what to do or should have done before completing the tick box
• To be able to set up automatic flags against the status of the above tick boxes (Like you have now for your common tick boxes).
• The set up to control of who gets what flags and also to be able to collect a other members flags incase of holiday or sickness.

3/ Flights

• On the main line of existing tabs add a new one dedicated to flights. This would be a good idea as with the increasing amount of flights these days, which are e-tickets, that we recorded the flight data and then via tokens and RTF’s design and issue our own professional e-tickets to customers.
• A nice touch in the other system we looked at “Web version of Dolphin” which had some sexy functionality where by on a flight tab it offered you all the options to complete if there was only one flight. If you then had other flight sectors to add you just clicked add flight sector and it provided all the additional details again to be filled in. The real sexy part was if you entered a PNR number it would complete the fields from somewhere on the net, we assumed this was just pulling data from Check My Trip.com as the Dolphin system had no links to any flight management system.

4/ Payments

• Recording payments on the Money tab. I understand this is currently being looked at and developed. One thing that we ask is we need to be able to record the payments as they come in. Now on some bookings this can mean getting deposits from 5 or 6 different people and likewise once they send in the balances. If we could record who paid what that would be great. What also would be good is if we could show a running balance of total amount paid and total amount still outstanding that had “Tokens” as these could then be used in our invoice RTF documents.

5/ Advance Booking Notes

• It would be nice to have the option of saving a e-mail that is received in response to a advance booking note e-mail sent out in the same notes field, E.G. E-mail notes. This would then keep a neat audit trail between us and suppliers and keep the general booking notes clean for correspondence between us and the customer. (The only current way we can do this is to copy the suppliers return e-mail into the advance notes e-mail section and clicks save, but currently this will save the note in the general notes only as requested by Ralph. It would be good to have the option where to save as this would satisfy all TCMS customers then)

6/ Reports

• We understand this is now going through a major overhaul? Is it at all possible to gain a list of what reports you are proposing, so we can see if we would require additional ones or is the report section going to be set up by the users? One report to remember please is the ATOL return.

7/ Calculator

• It would be a great help if we could have available within TCMS on the tour booking pages the ability to pop up a currency exchange calculator that uses the currency rates that we have set up in TCMS admin section. This could either be a link to activate or a keyboard shortcut to launch the pop up.

8 / TOMS (Tour Operator’s Margin Scheme)

• You could ask why is this last on our priority list? We currently manage this ok ish now, but it would be a lot easier if this could be set up in the system automatically as this will remove staff error.

Lets see if we can get a agreed community development list in a priority order on which you could keep a rolling schedule of timescales.

Regards

Peter

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Permalink Reply by Peter Collingsworth on March 5, 2008 at 4:12pm

Alex

As we are the only one so far to reply to this post does that mean that our requests are at the top of the list????

If they do not ask they do not get.

Regards

Peter

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Permalink Reply by TourCMS team on March 5, 2008 at 4:20pm

Hi Peter,
Ah - well people know they have asked before! :)
Yes enquiries is at the top of the list. Then deposit rules / balance due dates. Then improvements to payment handling.
Best wishes. Alex

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Permalink Reply by Peter Collingsworth on March 5, 2008 at 4:25pm

Remeber if you ever want to chat about enquiries I am more than willing, also to give you an insight to our side of things.

Peter

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Permalink Reply by Ralph Foulds on March 17, 2008 at 8:08pm

Reports please!
We really need the ability to extract booking data, both the original summary and financial data reports - anything similar to the Advanced Booking Search, but that delivers the data in Excel files would be useful - its taking us ages typing in booking data that we used to be able to get out in one click.
Also, you seem to be getting several more TTA members on board, and I'm sure they'll all be very thankful for a report to match the TTA's requirements. I've sent all this info off to you already - let me know if you need any more details to help create it.
Thanks, Ralph

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