The Online Customer Booking portal allows you customers to;

Integrating the online booking portal into your website should only take you a few minutes, once you have set up your account, simply click into the settings area of KennelBooker and then into the 'Online Booking Portal' settings page.

You can configure the portal from the following settings page linked below. From the settings page you will find the link to your booking portal page, turn on and off certain features, hide certain fields, make fields mandatory, and configure availability settings.

Adding a link to your companies website or social channels is very straight-forward, all you need to do open the CMS for you website (Wordpress, Wix, SquareSpace etc), and then create or add a button/link to your website.

Most customers will generally add a Book Now button to their websites main menu. The link you will need to open your customised booking portal can be found on the Portal Settings Page.

From the settings page you just need to copy in the URL that should look similar to the following highlighted links.

From your own websites content management system (CMS) or designer, you will just need to add a button or link onto your website or in your websites menu, and point the URL to the link that you have just copied.

Once added to your website, when your customers click on the link they will be directed to your online booking portal, this portal can be customised from the online portal settings page. From the online portal customers can sign into an existing account, create a new account, or just check your availability.

If you wish you can prevent new customers from creating accounts on the online booking portal. This will allow you to create customer accounts internally and send the customer on a link so that they can set a password on their account.

It is also possible to block certain customers from making bookings on the online booking portal. You may wish to do this if the pets or the customer is problematic and you do not wish them back at your facility. The message shown is the default message shown to customers when they attempt to make a booking.

When a new customer creates an account online, you can also get notified when this happens.

If you use the Q&A feature on the system on initial sign up, you can have customers fill this in if you have this option turned off, customers will only fill in the Q&A when making a booking.

The booking wizard workflow options relate to the steps that are shown to the customer. When they make a booking, it is possible to turn off the bookings steps which asks the customer to fill in the Q&A or to add Additional Services to their booking or to add Products that you sell to the booking as well .

Q&A Example

You can make customers fill in this section when signing up. by enabling the following settings on online portal settings page.

Additional Services Step

Products Step

When customers go to create an account on the customer portal, they will be asked to fill in a number of data fields. It's possible using these settings to hide certain fields and to make certain fields required so that the system will force them to add an answer.

To show/hide the fields on this form you can enable/disable the various fields from the online portal settings page

Once you have customized this screen the customer's signup form will look similar to the screen shot shown below.

If you wish, you can allow your customers to add in the dates of their pets vaccinations as part of the booking process, you can make this a requirement when customers are making a booking. A lot of facilities will have this feature turned off as they wish to validate the pets vaccinations upon check-in and require customers to bring in proof of vaccination upon arrival.

The settings available in this panel allow you to firstly add quick availability checks to the login page of your customer portal so customers can quickly see if you've got space for boarding without having to log in or create an account. Additionally, another button can be added to the start of the booking wizard to quickly check availability without going through the full wizards.

Portal Login Page

Wizard

It is also possible to hide available messages on the online portal so that customers can simply fill in their required dates and submit their booking request. Turning On this feature adds an additional FOMO (fear of missing out) element whereby customers will make bookings earlier to prevent missing out.

If when adding a booking there is no availability, there is an additional option that can be enabled to allow customers to add themselves to your waitlist. If the customer wishes to add themself to the wait list, a waitlist booking will be created in these system and you will receive a notification of such. Please see here for more information on the waitlist feature within KennelBooker.

And finally, there are two additional settings that allow you to prevent bookings being placed within X hours of check-in or bookings being placed to far into the future. The first option allows you to prevent customers from booking in within 12 hours of their desired check-in time for example. While the second option prevents customers from making x number of days into the future e.g. 182 days (half a year).

This section allows you to set up your cancellation settings by default. The system will not allow cancellations of bookings on the online system unless you specify this.

You can set this up for each booking, for instance, you may not wish customers to be able to cancel their boarding bookings online. However, you may allow them to cancel their day care bookings.

Additionally, it is also possible to add an hourly block to the cancellation of bookings so that customers cannot cancel a booking with an x number of hours of check-in. This prevents customers from cancelling bookings overnight. This hourly block can be customized to your own specific requirements.

At the end of the booking process, it's also possible to ask your customers to agree to your terms and conditions.

Once enabled, customers will see your terms and conditions, we will automatically truncate this to about two paragraphs with the option to read more. The customer can then click on the I agree to checkbox and submit their booking. See the following article for more details on how to add in your terms and conditions.

If you sell products and have added them to your KennelBooker account via the Products settings page, you can enable this feature to allow customers to purchase items via a Point of Sales type interface. Customers can select the items that they wish to purchase, if you have integrated the online payments feature customers can also pay for the items online.

If you plan to offer discount codes to customers you can add them here, discount codes can be created and linked to a percentage, it is also possible to limit discount codes to only be used once per customer.

From here you can add in your Google and Meta tracking codes/pixels. These codes allow you to track conversions from ad campaigns that you may run on Google or on Facebook/Meta. If you do not run or use these services you can ignore this section.

This section allows you to set descriptions for each of your main booking types, the text that you add there will appear in the Summary panel when the customer is making a booking.

From the Online Booking Portal settings page you have access to a number of features that lets you customize the online booking experience for your customers.

If you need to or you only wish existing customers to use the online portal you can disable to signup from on the system by enabling the following option.

If you have clocked particular customers from adding bookings via the setting on the customer profile screen, when a customer goes to make a booking the following message will appear. You can customize this message to your liking.

If you wish to you can hide the costs associated with bookings from the online portal as well as the total amount owed on any existing bookings.

If you want to you can allow customers to enter the dates of their pets vaccinations as part of the online booking process - most facilities require their staff to check/validate dates on check so this option is turned off by default. This setting will require vaccinations for Boarding or Daycare bookings online, if you require vaccinations for Grooming and Universal bookings you can enable this options via the settings.

If you allow customers to keep credit on their account to use against future bookings, you can enable a feature that lets them apply credit to their bookings online and to also load up their account with credit. You can enable these options independently if you wish.

To allow customers to apply credit to their bookings you will need to also specify a default payment type for payments made with credit. Most facilities will have a payment type called 'Account Credit' or similar that they use for these purposes. (Additional Payment types can be added from the Customize Text settings screen).

To allow customers to purchase credit online you will need to enable the following option, once enabled you will need to have a Product in the system that the purchase will be tied to (you can add Products from the Products settings page).

When a customer goes to add credit to their account the system will create a Sale, and add the product you specify to the sale at the denomination that the customer specifies. Once paid this balance is added to their account.

Note: you need to use the Online Payments feature to use this option.

This feature will allow you to stop customers booking in within X hours of check-in, some businesses don't want customers to be able to book online and immediately turn up at their door! Just enable the feature and then input the number of hours in this input box.

Stop customers from booking more then X days into the future, Add in the number of days in this input boxes provided, separate options appear for boarding and daycare.

You can allow customers to cancel bookings from the online system if you wish to this can be configured separately for each booking type, you can also specify that a booking cannot be cancelled withing X hour of the check-in time for example some facilities will not let customers cancel within 24 hours of check-in.

You can also specify if the customer forfeits the cost of the booking, when cancelled the customer will still be charged and the booking will still show up in Revenue reports.

This section allows you to show or hide certain field or functionality on the customer portal.