In this video, we will explain to you how to create an enquiry.
Transcript
In this video, I am going to show you how to create inquiries in Tour CMS. Tour CMS has a built-in inquiry management system which enables you to track individual requests from customers. Inquiries are non-date or product-specific communications with your customer.
Creating a New Inquiry
So we have different ways of creating a new inquiry in TourCMS. First of all, if we start out at our home page, we can go directly to New Inquiry, which will open the new inquiry page and allow us to create a new inquiry.
So we just type in the name of the customer who, for example, called us on the phone to ask for some information. It would be good if you could provide his email address so we can also answer in a written way to the request. You can enter some more info, it's almost like creating a new customer.
Then you can assign a status to the inquiry: Is it trash? Is it open for staff from customer's side? For the agent? For the supplier? Or you can just close it as a successful booking or not booked, or just a general inquiry asking for some information. So let's just say the customer calls us with some info requests, which you can also assign a category to if you want, and a staff member. And then you can just type in here what the question is: "What is the pickup time for the city tour?" for instance. You can assign it a value if you want to do that. And then you need to assign it to a channel. And you can also choose a follow-up date for this inquiry. So let's say if you want to answer in a maximum of 24 hours, you just put it on tomorrow, so tomorrow you will be urged to respond to this inquiry.
So we created a new inquiry, and it was created on the fly together with the new customer. So, in one step, we created a new customer and a new inquiry. So now you can work with this inquiry. You can answer the customer, for instance: "Pickup is at 8:30 AM." So you can just save it as an internal note, or you can directly send this information as an email to the customer. You have different options on how to, what to do when you update the inquiry: You can just update it, you can update it and go to the customer record, or you can go to the inquiry list. So we are going to do that, we only put in a note on the inquiry list. And now we see all the inquiries from our customers. If we want to edit them, we just click on a new inquiry, and we could enter another note here for this inquiry and for this customer.
You can also create an inquiry from the customer file directly. So if you look for a customer, you can just create a new inquiry right from this point, which works the same way as we just saw in our little example. So that's the way how to create an inquiry.
Inquiry Form Builder
Another very useful thing is that you can put an inquiry form on your homepage in a very easy manner. If you go to Google and you look for "Tour CMS inquiry," the first result you're going to find is "Add an enquiry form to your website." So here you get a very detailed explanation on how to add an inquiry form to your website. You get some example code here also, and at the end of this article, you get a full list of the fields you can use for your inquiry.
If you're not so much into coding, you can just use our Inquiry Form Builder to build your inquiry form, which easily lets you add a field to your inquiry. Like for example, the first name, you can choose if it's a text type or a multiline text type, or if it's a select or if it's a password. So you can just choose which kind of field you want to enter in your inquiry. You can also create a placeholder value if you want, like for date formats or similar things. And you can also select if this is a required field when filling out the inquiry. So we can add this field to our form. Then we add the last name to our form. And then we add the email address. And then we could add, like, let's say, a custom field, which would be multiline, and a text box. And now we have a very basic contact form here.
To create the code correctly, you would need to enter your Tour CMS account ID. Optionally, you can enter the general ID and inquiry key for the Tour CMS backend, like some kind of internal code you want to use. You need a return URL for your inquiry, and if you want, you can also define a problem URL just in case something is not working. So once you have chosen all the fields you want to include in this inquiry, you can just generate a code. Now you get advised that we didn't enter the account ID and the inquiry key, so you will need to add that before this works, but you get the whole code already here. Print it out to include on your web page.
So it's really easy to create an inquiry in TourCMS, and it's a really good way to communicate with your customers. Also, if we keep in mind that out of a hundred inquiries, more or less 20 will end up making a booking for one of your products.