Pre-sales product question – help please!

[Gregg]

Hi – my wife runs a business in which she runs antenatal courses for pregnant couples. Currently she uses a wordpress website which takes bookings (via woocommerce I believe) and she manages all of the back-end manually using excel spreadsheets. This back-end approach was sufficient when she had just a few locations to manage but it’s becoming unwieldy as her business has expanded (she now operates courses for 18-20 people 6-7 times per year in 15 locations ie, lots of courses and people to manage!). So we’re looking for a more automated way to help out. Some requirements mostly include the following:
– Automated contact management: once a client has booked a course (event), then this information is captured and stored for future use eg, clients should be tagged so all of those who booked a course in a given location can be notified before it takes place
– Automated workflow: for each course, there are a series of admin steps which need to be monitored and tracked (eg, contacting clients and instructors) so we know what’s completed and what’s not (via a ‘to-do’ list)
– Automated email notifications: notify clients and teachers about an impending course
– Calendar sync: all course dates on website should feed into a master admin calendar
– Course management: should include a waiting list

Can The Events Calendar and/or related apps able to meet our needs? Happy to discuss.

Thanks Gregg

[Geoff]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for getting in touch!

I would love to say that our plugins are the perfect fit, but I don’t think they will be for this project. The Events Calendar is great for displaying a calendar of events and Event Tickets (as well as Event Tickets Plus) is great for selling tickets for those events, but the system is not really designed for booking courses and does not have built in email communications that would automate things in the way you’re describing.

My recommendation is to look for plugins that are built around booking capabilities. Here’s a quick search on the WordPress plugin directory that might help you gets started.

Sorry for the bad news about our plugins, but does this at least help answer your question? Please let me know.

Cheers,
Geoff

[Gregg]

Hi Geoff – thanks for your reply. One thing i don’t really understand though – when you say ‘Event Tickets (as well as Event Tickets Plus) is great for selling tickets for those events, but the system is not really designed for booking courses’, can you please clarify the difference between selling tickets and booking courses?

I think of both items as one and the same – unless i’m missing something which is entirely possible!

Thanks Gregg

[Geoff]

Hey Gregg (ack, missed the second “g” last time!)

A booking calendar is one that would be better suited for taking appointments and having a waiting list for when timeslots are not available to be booked.

By contrast, our plugins are more designed around a calendar of events. You can certainly use our plugins for selling seats in a course (and it would do that well), but the automated workflow for waiting lists and email communications that you might typically expect with a true booking system would be lacking for sure.

Does this help clarify my last answer a bit? That was a great question to distinguish the two, so please let me know if I can help answer any other questions about how our system works and I’d be happy to. 🙂

Cheers!
Geoff

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

Posts