The Purchases Tab in Xola gives you a way to search for all customers bookings. It allows you to see the customer and payment details, as well as the modify bookings, add notes, see a timeline of the bookings, and communicate with the customer.
What's covered in this article:
The scroll bar
The scroll bar appears to the left of the screen in your Purchases tab, and is a scrollable library of all your customer purchases.
It is sorted in order of most recent bookings, so your newest bookings are always located at the top. From the scroll tab you’ll see customer name, tickets or equipment purchases, the dollar amount of the purchases, and the date of their experience.
If you click into the purchase from the scroll tab, it will bring up the entire purchase to the right.
Searching for Purchases
Your purchases are searchable by customer name, email, phone, or tag.
When your customers check out on your website or when you make their booking in the back office, you collect their name, email, and phone. Typing in any one of those three items will pull up their purchase.
Tags, or small notes added to a purchase, allow you to filter purchases for commonalities. Tags are either automatically generated by Xola or you can add your own tags to a purchase after it is made.
Modify Bookings
Click here to learn more about about all the modification you can do to your customers bookings from the Purchases Tab.
Purchase Details
On the purchases tab you can see the reservation details, modify the customers information, resend the confirmation email, see signed waivers, see questionnaire answers, and even see a payment summary of the booking.
Tag a Purchase
In Xola a tag is a word or phrase added to a purchase that can be used for searching and filtering in the Purchases tab. When you type the tag into the search bar, it will bring up all purchases that have been tagged as such. A tag may be auto-generated by Xola or added in manually after a purchase has been made.
Auto-generated tags
Xola auto-generates tags for for purchases in the following circumstances:
- An Affiliate code is used (“Affiliate” + affiliate code)
- A Gift Certificate or Coupon code is redeemed (“Gift” + gift code)
- A booking is rescued via abandoned booking recovery (“Rescue”)
- A booking is made on a mobile device (“Mobile”)
- A booking is made through Book Now buttons on a third-party website (URL of website)
- Navigate to Purchases tab and search for the customer purchase.
- In the Add tag field, type in your tag.
- Hit your keyboard's Enter key to finish tagging.
For example, if several members of a local retirement home book separately for the same trip, you could tag all those purchases with the tag "Retirement home outing". When you type in “Retirement home”, it will filter down your scroll tab to display only those purchases carrying that tag. A great feature for birthday parties, bachelor(ette) parties, scout groups, retirement homes, field trips, and more!
Where do tags appear?
Tags appear in the “Add a tag” field inside a purchase. Your Events and Transactions reports both feature a Tags column that pulls in all tags associated with bookings.
Adding notes to the booking
- In the Purchases tab, navigate to the customer purchase.
- Below the Booking Details and Payment Summary, click on the +Add a booking note field.
- Type in your note here, whatever it may be. When you are finished, click outside of the text box
- When you go back into this Purchase, you’ll see the note (in gray) in the same field.
The Timeline tab
The Timeline is a history of every single transaction and modification that's ever been made on a purchase. This gives you complete transparency into all the changes that has been made to a customer purchase, from initial point of sale to post-trip!
Transactions (charges and refunds) and modifications (arrival, guest count, add-ons, experience swaps) are recorded in the Timeline. Each record contains a timestamp as well as the name of the Xola user who made the change, making it easy to know who did what and when.
Note: Transactions will appear green, modifications will appear blue, and any refunds or returned payments red.
The Communications Tab
If you want to message a single customer you can do this easily by searching for them in the Purchases tab.
- Navigate to the Purchases tab and search for the customer to whom you'd like to send a message.
- In the customer purchase, scroll to the Timeline section.
- Select the Communication tab.
- Click the box for Email and/or SMS
- Give your email or SMS message a subject and write your message.
- Press Send
- The Email and/or SMS will show up in the message chain below.
- Customers responses to email will pass through Xola and be added to the message chain
- Customer responses to text messages will not appear for you in Xola
Note for SMS: Messages that exceed 160 characters will be sent as 2 separate texts. If a customer calls the contact number from the SMS message, they will reach a recording that instructs them to contact the Company that they booked with (you!). If you're interested in hearing that automated message, you can call 415-800-1140.