The best Zapier integrations for booking automation
May 30, 2022
Designed for busy entrepreneurs and large businesses alike, our booking, cancelling, rebooking and amends automation tool allows you to save time by relieving administrative burden, while increasing sales by keeping your business online and open for revenue 24/7, 365.
BookingLive will automate unnecessary customer comms, saving administrative time and costs, enabling your staff to focus on the most important tasks when they are in the office.
This customer communication automation drives new revenue channels by automating up and cross sells, whilst also mitigating no-shows through automated multiple reminder touch points. No customer wants to be left in a queue, left on hold or ignored due to busy phone lines or office closure. BookingLive enables all services to be booked online at your customer’s convenience, putting the customer journey first.
What is a Zapier integration?
“Easy automation for busy people. Zapier moves info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work.”
Zapier in an app that connects over 5,000 apps to each other, allowing information to be passed between them seamlessly. In Zapier, you choose your “triggers”, which is what kicks off the automated process between your apps of choice. A “Zap” is what happens when your trigger causes an automated action; such as sending an email, SMS or posting on social media. Find our more about how Zapier works here.
You can use Zapier to connect your BookingLive system with thousands of the most popular apps, so you can automate your work and have more time for what matters most—no code required.
We’ve outlined a few of the most popular Zapier + BookingLive integrations that could benefit you:
Set up your own CRM with Microsoft Office 365 Business
Of course, we don’t need to explain what Microsoft Office is. But using Zapier, you can seamlessly integrate your booking updates with products like Excel, Outlook, Word, SharePoint and more, enabling streamlined business management.
For the very initial stages of a start up business and you need to get your business off the ground with as low spend as possible, Outlook can be used as the bare bones of a CRM. With Zapier, a new booking through BookingLive can trigger the creation of a new contact in Outlook – and there you have it, your CRM is being built entirely through automation!
We take pride in supporting small businesses and understand the importance they hold to our economic recovery. Because of this, we have lots of information on small businesses in our newsroom, including: “essential software for small businesses” “3 free tools for your startup” “how to start a business from home”
Keep your finances in check with Wave
Wave provides financial services and software especially for small businesses, and their suite of products work seamlessly together, so you can effortlessly manage your businesses finances. Create and send professional invoices and receipts, and manage your payroll, payments, and expenses.
With our integration, you can also set up a trigger to create an invoice in Wave when a new booking has been made through BookingLive. To take things one step further, you can also automatically record an income transaction in Wave (with optional Sales Tax and optional Payment Processing Fee) when a transaction has been completed in BookingLive.
Communicate with your employees using Slack
If you’re just a one person band at the moment, a Slack integration won’t be necessary. But, as your team grows, Slack will enable your team to stay on the same page and make decisions more quickly by bringing all of your work communication into one place. You can use Slack to share documents and files, instant message with individuals and teams, and make voice and video calls. With BookingLive, you can set automatic notifications to be sent to internal slack channels with any booking updates.
Notify your customers via text using Twilio
Used by organisations like Netflix and Airbnb, Twilio is a communications tool to support you as you scale your business. A BookingLive integration will allow you to set rules to trigger automated SMS messages to your customers for different scenarios; when a booking is made, when a transaction is complete or when a booking needs to be cancelled.
Host online meetings using Zoom and Google Meet
Even in a post-pandemic work, video call integrations will enable you to attract customers from all around the world (time difference permitting!) Increasing your audience and customer base will undoubtedly increase your sales and our video call integrations mean you can conduct your courses and events from anywhere. Whether you’re a language tutor or a yoga instructor, you can run your business from the comfort of your own home, and your customers can stay in the comfort of theirs.
For more information, check out this blog with 7 easy steps on selling your online courses.
Set up automatic posting on social media
Undoubtedly the most effective form of advertising for a business of any size with a minimal budget. Integrating with all popular social media platforms, there’s an extensive amount of automated triggers that can be created. Kill two birds with one stone by streamlining your booking updates with your content marketing, advertising and social media efforts!
- Create a tweet when you create a new bookable item in your BookingLive app, or even when a new upsell is created, enticing new and existing customers to rebook a service with you in order to get their hands on your new merchandise.
- Publish a Facebook page post when a new bookable item is created in your BookingLive app
- Publish a photo in your Instagram for Business account when a new event is created, or publish a promotional photo when a booking is cancelled – ensuring all of your services are booked at maximum possible capacity!
Automate your admin using Docusign
Send out documents to your customers for signature before you see them. This could be useful for legal documents, waivers, or if parental signature is required for an activity or event. Even if these documents don’t necessarily need to be signed ahead of time, Docusign has reported an 80% faster turnaround time and an average of £30 in time and materials saved per agreement.
There you have it, just a few core examples of countless ways you can streamline your entire business process with the help of a few tiny, yet transformative Zaps! Check out over 3,000 integrations here.
Find out more about our native integrations and features.
How to manage bookings with BookingLive
Now, lets touch on a number of ways a customer can be introduced to your business and book your services whilst you sit back and relax! According to Contentsquare’s 2021 Digital Experience Benchmark report, the average time on page across all industries is 54 seconds – so it’s imperative that all of the information is right there in front of them with little to no effort required, so your customer doesn’t give up and go to your competitor.
Read more about why your business needs to focus on customer experience, and the importance of user experience in online booking system.
Your customer creates a booking
You can create your bookable items with an abundance of information, meaning your customers don’t need to contact you directly before they book. The added information section where you can write all about your event, course or class gives the customer the reassurance that you are the right provider for them.
Alongside this information, you can also enter the capacity for each item, the pricing of the item (and if they differ for adults, children or groups), and also available time slots right there in Step 1 of our signature 5 step booking journey.
Your customer pays online
Your customer can’t complete the 5 step journey and complete their booking without finalising payment to secure their place. Not only does this enable you to track capacity and event attendance, but you can also get a good idea of the profit your business is making in real time. Tracking capacity means you can focus on the events that are piquing customers’ interest and gaining traction, and also look into your other events that maybe aren’t getting as much attention and may require more marketing efforts to pull potential customers in.
To ensure your customers’ money is safe, we have partnered with Stripe; an industry leading payment gateway trusted by businesses such as Deliveroo, ASOS and Monzo. Learn more about Stripe here.
Automated reminders
After booking is complete, your customer will receive 2 automated reminders, 24 and 2 hours before the booking. These reminders are proven to reduce no-shows and also encourage the customer to reach out to you if they need to cancel or reschedule. Should this be the case, you will have plenty of time to try and fill their place by utilising our waiting list functionality.
Waiting list
If your event is at maximum capacity, you will have the ability to set a waiting list for the event with our Grow and Professional tiers*. If there is a cancellation, you can contact a customer on the waiting list asking if they would like to take the place. The customer does not pay to get on the waiting list, so there will be no need for processing refunds. Because of this, it does require a little work initially to contact each person and process their booking, but this waiting list function can support ensuring every event you have is fully booked!
If your customer has access to the internet, they can book your services any time of day, from any device, 24/7. Whilst the majority of your customers will prefer to book online, we can’t ignore those who will still prefer the human touch. To meet the demands of this specialised segment of customers we must ensure that the bulk of administration and needless calls are being dealt with by a booking and scheduling app, allowing a friendly voice to be available at the other end of the phone when it is actually needed, best representing your business.
At BookingLive, we have a support team to help you with any system questions you may have. As with any system, there will be some admin management needed, so this support will ensure you know your system inside out and can provide the best possible service to your customers.
BookingLive: Get Started With Online Scheduling & Booking Automation
We are supporting thousands of business owners across 80+ countries with online booking automation systems. You can set up your products and services in under 5 mins and have your bookable items live and ready for customers to purchase 24/7, on any device, from anywhere. If you want to take payments through your online booking & scheduling system a small percentage is charged per sale made. Find out more about our tiered pricing structure here, ensuring you have the best possible value for your booking volume.
This flexible risk-free solution provides small business owners with an industry-leading customer experience, automation of administration tasks, and secure payment handling.
We’re here to help, every step of the way. If you’re reading this blog, you’ll be able to live chat bot in the corner of your screen with a solutions specialist available to help you with any booking system queries you may have. (Bear in mind, you won’t be speaking with a bot, so we’re available Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm UK time.)
You can also email sales@bookinglive.com, call us on 0800 1310 342 or submit a message to our contact us form.