Our plans for the year ahead
It’s been a busy summer for eola!
We expanded our team and launched some significant upgrades to our technology. We also spent time out on the road meeting our partners. We wanted to understand more about how you use eola day-to-day and where we can add to the platform to improve your experience.
As we look ahead to 2022, we wanted to outline some of the areas we will be focusing on and explain how we intend to shape the platform to support your business.
Upgrading user permissions
The size of your team can change across the year. Managing their access to eola was identified as an important challenge. From hiding information entirely, to deciding who can edit what, we want you to be able to create a personalised setup that works for your business.
To address this, we’ll be upgrading our user permission framework. This will allow you to easily add or remove instructors and decide what each individual instructor can access. We will be working on this upgrade over winter, with the goal of launching ahead of the 2022 summer season.
Improving reporting
Running an experience business is complex. You are constantly making decisions about what activities to run, what customers to target and where you should invest next. We want to help you by upgrading and expanding our reporting tools. Our goal is simple: less time-consuming admin and more relevant, helpful insights.
To achieve this, we’ll be improving the user interface of reports to allow you to easily filter and look up information. We’ll also be adding new reports all about your activities, customers and bookings. These upgrades will give you powerful insights into your business. We hope to launch the upgraded reporting suite after the new user permission framework.
Increased flexibility
Your customers’ needs can change and bookings often require updating. To help you make these changes we plan to broaden the capabilities of our booking management features.
Need to reassign an organiser or transfer a booking to a different activity? Want to make an update to all the parties under one booking? We’ve got you covered. Our goal is to ensure the management of bookings is simple and flexible so you can respond to the needs of your customers.
As part of this work we also intend to make some important updates to the calendar. It holds some of your most important information - when there’s a queue of customers outside, that information should be easy to find and simple to understand. We’ll be adding new filters and information displays to make the calendar your day-to-day go-to location.
These are both important and complex areas of our service, so we expect this process to take some time. We’ll be sharing regular updates with you as we progress.
Disclaimers, question packs and invites
We want to reduce the administrative burden that inaccurate or incomplete customer information can result in. To achieve this, we’ll be upgrading the customer interface for disclaimers, question packs and participant invites.
This will include new designs to reduce instances of the wrong information being entered, as well as new features to streamline a returning customer's experience. This is part of our continued investment into the customer booking app (the new widget). We’re aiming to have this ready for use in the coming months and will be sharing a special update on our progress soon.
New services
Our ambition is to help you grow by unlocking new opportunities for your business. In line with this, we have a number of new services in the pipeline.
We recently launched an early stage membership feature which we will be investing in over the course of the coming year. Memberships can be a highly valuable tool for your business, and have been shown to significantly improve customer loyalty and revenue per customer over time. For seasonal businesses, they can provide a vital stream of income over the quiet months.
In addition, we want to help you maximise the variety of activities you can run. We’re planning to improve our support of overnight activities by expanding the times that activities can run over. This will include updates to the activity creation screens and the customer booking experience. We’ll keep you updated on our progress on each of these new services and how you can use them to grow your business.
What's next?
We’ll be sharing updates on the features outlined in this article over the coming months. We’ll also be keeping you up to speed on all the smaller upgrades we add each month in response to your feedback.
Have a question?
Your views and ideas are the key to helping us shape eola for the future. Our partner team is always available should you have any questions or queries.
Reach out to them on help@eola.co
Read more
Creating a new booking experience
How to create an activity on eola
