Learn more about how to use the web-based TourCMS POS (Point of Sale) application.
Transcript
Hi everybody! My name is John, and I work for Palisis, the company that owns and operates TourCMS. We at Palisis thought it would be a good idea to make some training videos to showcase the capabilities and use of TourCMS. The subject of this training video is POS, the web-based point-of-sale application of TourCMS. This application can be a great tool for your salespeople who come in direct contact with your customers at your, you probably guessed it, various points of sale.
In the following minutes of this video, I will demonstrate the operational use of this application and how it might help you to sell more in less time. After this brief introduction, I shall show you the different versions of this app, followed by showing you how to log into the POS application. Once we pass this first milestone, we will take a closer look at the booking process: how to make them and how we can handle them once they're in your system. Then we'll take a closer look at the check-in functionality that will be used if your customers are already in possession of a digital voucher. After that, we'll look at some useful management tools that allow the user to gain information quickly and reliably. At the end of this video, I will make some final remarks and allow myself to give you a little task so that the things you've seen once in this training video become real know-how and you become a bigger asset to your company.
POS Versions
Before we can sink our teeth into the use and capabilities of the point-of-sale application, I should tell you that there are currently three versions of POS available:
- There is an iOS version.
- A browser-based version.
- And the Voucher device.
They are slightly different in intended usage, devices, and capabilities.
- The iOS version is intended to be used at your points of sale and works wonderfully with iPads and with some limitations on size on iPhones. It is capable of booking, scanning vouchers, and with a standing connection to a printer, also capable of printing.
- As such, the browser-based app also works great at your points of sale. It is best used on a computer. It is capable of booking and printing vouchers, but lacks the capability to scan them.
- Finally, we have the Voucher version. A voucher comes with its own handheld device and is geared towards the redemption of vouchers. Therefore, it can scan but misses the possibility to book or print.
All in all, the look and feel of all versions are very similar to each other. For technical reasons of video recording, I'll showcase the use of the point-of-sale application from within my browser on my laptop. Please don't feel discouraged if your version of the point of sale is a little bit different from what you see in this video. I'll show you the fundamentals, which should be applicable to all versions of it. As a matter of fact, the look and feel of all three versions are so close to each other that one could say "no one knows." So I think it's enough theory for the moment. Let's continue with the real thing.
Logging In
You can access the login page by opening up the app or by entering `HTTP://pos.tourcms.com` into the address bar of your browser. The login page of TourCMS requires you to fill in three different pieces of information: account, username, and password.
- The account is specific to your company. In this case, I generated an account for my pretend company "Test Zurich," because I named my account "test_zurich."
- The username is specific to you. In my case, my name is John Gurkel, and that's why my username is plain and simple "jgurkel."
- The password is specific to you as well. It must contain 7 to 12 characters and must have at least one uppercase character, one lowercase character, a digit, and a special character like the `@` sign, hash tag, dollar sign, circumflex, ampersand, or equal sign.
At this point, I must give you a little warning. If you enter these credentials wrong three times, TourCMS will automatically lock your user account. Only the user accounts marked as "Account Owner" and those of TourCMS support staff are capable of lifting this block and sending you a new password.
Booking Section
The booking section of the point-of-sale application contains three different functions: New Booking, View Booking, and Search Booking. Let's start by making a new booking.
On the following page, we see all the products we can sell on any given date. Let's select the date first. I can quickly choose "today" or "tomorrow", where I can click on the day to access the calendar. Let's say our customer wants to do the activity tomorrow. Now the system displays to us all the tours with departures on that day. Depending on your product catalogue, it's even possible to filter various categories or search for a specific tour name.
Let's choose this tour. The following page shows us the various rate types for this tour. I chose two adults for this example. If a tour has multiple departures per day, it asks me to choose one. We can also add options or pickup points. We even have the possibility to add notes at this point. If all is to our customer's liking, we add this choice to the cart.
The next page shows the shopping cart. Here you have multiple possibilities like adding more items, clearing the whole cart, or just single items, and editing the existing ones. Besides that, we can choose a travel agent or enter a discount. Because those two customers seem to be a lovely couple on their honeymoon, I can be a nice guy and add a promo code to do them a favour. If all is said and done, we can proceed to the checkout. Here we can add some information about the customer. In this case, my company requires me to just enter the customer's email address. How much information you want to enter on this page is up to your company's specific demands for customer relations.
Once we take care of this, we can proceed by creating the booking with or without payment right there and then. In my example, I choose to create and take a payment. On the following page, we are required to enter some form of payment. The current settings of my account allow me to take credit cards by phone, in physical form, if you work with a credit card charging device, cash, or any other method that might be used by a company. In regard to the amount that is paid, Point-of-Sale offers you to take the remaining balance, half of that, or to enter an amount of your choosing. In that case, you can click here and enter the amount on your device. Depending on the payment method, you can add or waive the corresponding fee. Should the client pay by using his credit card over the telephone, then you are required to fill in the necessary information in this area. Should cash be used, the system offers you the choice of various amounts of cash received, and if necessary, displays the exact amount of change. By the way, Point-of-Sale allows splitting the bill into several payments and/or payment methods.
Once this is done, we have to submit this payment. All this leads us to the booking overview page. Here we have a whole bunch of possibilities to further customise the booking. Besides getting a good overview of the whole booking, like chosen tour, remaining balance, booking status, used promo codes, or booking date, we can go and view customer information or even edit it. We can also add a new booking with the same lead customer details. If need be, we can even enter a custom booking name. Down here in the monitor, we can see the monetary situation of this booking. And if we want to add a new customer payment, I can quickly add the "do payment" so we get this booking through a confirmed status.
In the product tab, we see more details about the product. We can edit this to our customer's wishes. We can add or edit options, as well as the pickup. If we click here on Edit, we see a whole list of other things we can do, like edit a note, edit rates and quantities, or remove and rebook the chosen products. Up here, we can add another product. If the booking is confirmed and today, we could also check in the customer today. On the other side, we can print the voucher for this booking or send an email to the customer. Here you can enter a multitude of different notes or cancel the whole booking. But now we know how to make a new booking with the point-of-sale application from TourCMS. By the way, if you click up here, you can retrace your booking steps or access the menu shortcut.
Let's get back to the home screen.
Viewing and Searching Bookings
If you want to look at a booking, you have two ways to do so. You can click here and search for a TourCMS booking number. Let's choose another booking I added a few moments ago, and click OK or hit Enter. We are now back in the booking overview, as we were before, with the same ability to customise it. But because the booking status of this booking is already confirmed and the travel date is today, we're able to check in our customers here.
Let's check the other possibility to look at the booking. Again, I head back to the home screen and press Search Bookings. Here we have the capability to search for lead customer surname, lead customer email, or booking name. It's nice to know that all these searches allow for partial matches, meaning the search entries don't have to perfectly match the results. Down here, we have some filter functions for the search. We can filter by tour date, booking start date, booking made date, or even filter by booking status. In this example, my customer tells me he is Mr. Smith, and he has booked for today. I enter his name and select the tour date as today. The system quickly gives me all matching results, usually sorted by booking number, but also lets me sort by name. Once we identified the right one, we can continue to the now well-known booking or review page. Here I have another little side note: existing customer requests and workflow notes are always displayed here in the middle. Pinned important notes are displayed up here. Again, we would have the possibility to edit this booking. This is it. You now know everything about the handling of bookings from within the point-of-sale application.
I can head back to the home menu.
Check-in Function
Let's continue to the check-in function of the web-based point-of-sale application. The checking function is, again, you probably guessed it, for checking in guests and redeeming their vouchers. To do so, in the browser-based version of the point-of-sale application, you should click on the Search button.
The following search query allows us to search for booking ID, travel agent reference, or customer surname. By default, the search is limited to the tour date of today, but this can be ticked off. In this test scenario, our customer gives us his voucher with the booking ID 201700099. If we enter this, the system quickly shows us the matching results. If this button here is greyed out and the system doesn't allow you to check in, you have one of two problems: either the travel date isn't today, or the booking is not yet fully paid and thereby not confirmed. The booking ID is unique, so in this case, there is no need to filter or sort the results. We can click down here, and thereby check the customer back on the home screen.
I should talk again about the biggest difference between the browser-based app and the iOS app. Do you remember when I told you that there was a difference between those two? Right, the browser version is missing the Scan functionality. Because iOS devices have a built-in camera, we implemented a scanning function on that version of POS. If we activate that process, we see that the camera scans for QR codes, and if it recognises one, it quickly compares it against the TourCMS database and displays the matching results. Again, this gives us the possibility to edit or check the customer. I'd like to mention that POS recognises the QR codes of many online travel agencies like Expedia or Viator.
Now we have seen both ways to check in a customer in the point-of-sale application in TourCMS.
Management Tools
Let's look at some neat functions that might be of use during the daily operational business of a tour operator. Under the title Management, we can see three tabs: Departures, Booking Totals, and History.
- If we click on Departures, the system displays today's departures to us. These are organised by tour and then by departure time. We can see the time of a tour, how many places are booked, how many are still available, and the tour status: is it open or already closed? Again, to the top left, we have the ability to choose the date in question. Besides that, we can filter for empty, booked, or full tours. A little bit more to the right, we can filter by tour status: open, ask first, or closed. We also have here the capability to the top right to search by tour name. Let's make an example and say we are a tour guide who is preparing for this evening's "Sure Alternate Walking Tour." To quickly find our tour, we can enter "Alt" into the search field and see today's departures. If we click on the 6:00 to 9:00 o'clock departure, we get a close look at the situation of that tour. We can look at the various bookings of this tour, and if we want to check them in, we can check for pickups we have to do, or even look at the situation of spaces and prices.
- If we go to Booking Totals, we'll get an operational overview of the whole booking situation. Total shows us how many places are booked, how many of them have already checked in, and how many check-ins are missing on any given tour. Recent Additions display to us how many bookings were made since a specific time. As we know by now, on the top left, we can choose the date of interest, and to the right, we to find more search filters. We can look for a specific tour, a time since what time those recent additions were made, and by which staff user those bookings were made.
- The last function I'd like to show you is the History function. Here we get a list of all the actions we did today. This function can help us to retrace the steps we took or to quickly re-enter a booking if we close it by accident. To the top left, we can filter them into "view bookings," "create bookings," and "voucher search." To the top right, we have a search field which easily allows us to search for the history of a specific booking.
Final Remarks
At the very beginning of this video, I told you that I would have a little task for you at the end of it. Here it is: please go and practice. Only by watching this video, you will not gain a deep proficiency in the use of this application. Ask your supervisor for a device and some time. Maybe practice with a co-worker to make it more realistic. In the end, the success of learning is always based on your will and your curiosity.
You now might ask yourself, "How can you get the point-of-sale application for TourCMS?" Please contact the Palisis sales team via email. The address is `support@palisis.com`.
"What can you do if POS doesn't work?" Please ask your supervisor or check yourself if the user settings are correct, the sales channel is turned on, and the API is turned on too. If these steps still don't make it work, please write an email to `support@palisis.com`. It's important for your support manager to know the exact account and username. If you can add a clear description of the problem, maybe even with some screenshots, support can act on your behalf much quicker.