Hi Sandy,
The few improvements that you have suggested are all good ideas and some of them have been raised by other customers also. If I can divide these as follows;
Running Order
The promotions are added in the comments to provide those customers of ours who have developed a custom booking widget to have section to note the promotion selected. Our booking API has since been updated to allow the promotion selected to show in a separate column but we haven't yet been able to transition all customers to the newer version. In short, it's planned that we will change this to just show comments.
Comments word count
I haven't came across this issue before, but when booking comments are added by the customer, this is a field that you can continue to edit or add to from your end. I can't think of a really good reason for 2000 word request from customers but do know some restaurants will paste in details of the menu and this might account for the allowed character count. I will see if we can amend this but in the meantime it could be a task of picking up the customer comments which are a little lengthy and summarise yourselves before service.
Booking Codes
The booking codes added are selectable in the booking process but I know that selecting multiple codes or scrolling to add more can be a little tricky, especially on smaller screens. We do have a plan to simplify the user interface of the booking process screen and this is on the list for re-design.
You may be interested to know that our native ResDiary Plus app does have a running order view in the pipeline and if you haven't yet downloaded this from the app store I would definitely recommend trying it out.
Customer name
The search does instantly start referring to your database and this can help for unusual first names, but if you enter 'John' for example, I can appreciate that there is only a small chance that the first few results would be correct. You should be able continue to enter details and ignore the suggestions until they match? I do find that a mobile/home number is a more unique identifier than name. Some reservations teams will input this first and may even pre-empt this from a caller display to better match the customer quicker and without any room for error.
I will raise each of the above as a separate request and this will help me update you if they make it to the development stage.
Thanks again for the feedback, it really is appreciated.
Kind regards,
Ewan
Ewan Farry
Product Manager
+44 207 871 7490
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Sandy Butcher
we are a tiny pub and do not print our running order but think we could display t the running order on an ipad to look at booking comments.
It would be useful if promotions ( in our case) were not included in booking comments so they do not appear in the running order...could this be an option.
Also please could you limit the amount words that can be used in booking comments and also the amount of lines..
....silly thing i know but its a pain when you display the running order on an ipad and some of our customers write war and peace using line spacing..you've got it set to 2000 characters which is alot...thanks
We really like the idea you've added of the preset phrases for birthdays etc but have you tried using this on a lap top ? comes up really low ?
One final thing when you add a customer name and it searches could it start to search one youve added first and surname so it limits the amount of options available ?
Thank you