Why the radio silence you may ask?
Have you missed us? Sorry for the radio silence around here the past few months, however, we have plenty of excuses if you want to hear them!
We have been working hard on updates to keep in compliance with the new European payment regulations of SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) and we have been busy developing new smaller features and tweaks to enhance the booking system for you all.
SCA (Strong Customer Authentication)
To make sure we are in line with SCA regulations, our tech team have been working away to ensure customer payments with Stripe integration (deposits and card capture) don’t fall through the cracks and decline payments. We did experience a couple of teething problems with the initial switch on, after hours of pre-testing behind the scenes, which unfortunately did affect a few restaurants. So you can see it wasn’t as easy as 1..2..3. However, hats off to the team as this is now live within simpleERB so you can rest easy knowing that customers deposits will now be accepted without any authorisation problems. Especially as Christmas is in sight with customers already making bookings!
If you don’t already have deposits and card capture set up, please see this link on more information. We feel this is a valuable feature in the lead up to Christmas to help reduce no shows and secure concrete festive bookings.
Snapshot of upcoming tweaks
We will also be sending out a new release update soon with all the new tweaks to current features to improve the system. A lot of the new updates have come from user suggestions, which we highly welcome. A couple of these changes include;
- Quick view of advanced cancelled bookings in manager day book (keep an eye out for large party cancellations!)
- Widget bookings default to mobile number (so customers are not adding a landline to the incorrect field)
- Historic booking report to show report in covers rather than bookings (more accurate data for forecasting)
- Cancellation email sent to customers who call to cancel if an email is supplied (for customer’s reference)
- Restaurant logo now displayed on customer booking confirmations (visual branding and marketing)
Along with the upcoming release notes, we have a couple of interesting blog posts on their way to help ease the pain in planning for the festive madness. So, we are happy to say…..we are back in the ‘blog’ business.
