Online Booking Systems for Councils & Local Authorities
July 12, 2021
Everybody knows that when it comes to the public sector and governmental offices, adhering to strict regulations and budgets is absolutely essential. It’s a natural part of public sector work, one determined by governmental budgets and the need to provide as much visible benefit to the public as possible, but it also means that improvements can often take a back seat.
Over the years, we’ve heard countless times that online booking systems for the public sector aren’t a priority, but at BookingLive want to change that perception by showing you what a booking system could do for your local government.
Online booking software can not only dramatically improve the efficiency of public sector offices, but also increase revenue. Whether you’re a council, a local authority or any other public-sector business, there are dozens of ways in which online booking platforms can help you.
What can a public sector online booking system do for you?
From our extensive research, we’ve found many local authorities use telephone, mail or online booking enquiry forms, rather than online live availability booking systems.
Such methods are time consuming and inefficient, leading to a loss of revenue and frustration for customers. By implementing an online booking system, time spent on administration tasks such as financial reconciliation, customer communications, booking notifications, reporting and up-selling, decreases significantly – as does human error. Online booking systems for councils also keeps data far more secure than paper-based systems
With an online booking system embedded on your site, you’re able to keep attract more customers because of the sheer convenience that online booking provides. This will allow your customers to book at their convenience. Consider for a moment that non-online booking platforms require not only your clients to be able to book during working hours, but also have access to telephones. By moving your booking online, you’re opening the door to round-the-clock bookings from customers, eliminating the friction of other booking systems.
Traditional, non-online booking methods might work fine if you’re dealing with the occasional customer. However, good public services are always dealing with more than a handful of customers at a time. When you’re managing services that, potentially, tens of thousands of people are liable to use, you need a booking system can handle high traffic, and that’s the power of online booking platforms like BookingLive.
By automating the entire booking process, BookingLive enables you to redirect staff away from booking management and towards other aspects of your public-sector business. Not only that, you will also have a higher customer retention rate. Why? Because customers often get frustrated when dealing a slow manual, limited booking
process.
What are the features of an online booking system?
Online booking systems like BookingLive are feature-rich, so that whatever your specific requirements are, you’re certain to find a feature or two that will fit your public-sector business.
If you’re worried about how the booking system will work for you, you can rest assured. Our online booking systems for councils can be seamlessly integrated into your current website or served as a sub domain or even better – a website and booking system in one.
That means that not only can you keep your existing logo, but also your colour scheme and any other branding details that you might have. Additionally, all BookingLive systems are mobile responsive, so no matter what device your customers are booking from, they’ll get a seamless and effective booking experience.
One of the top features of our online booking system for public sector businesses is our upload option. This allows customers to upload pertinent documents required for a booking to push through. For example, council tenants can forward relevant information before coming in to their meeting. BookingLive is even part of local authority networks, ensuring that all your transactions go through effortlessly.
Alongside these huge features, BookingLive also offers a comprehensive business management and reporting system together with a support team. When you sign up for BookingLive’s online booking software, you’ll be handed your very own personal Project Manager and Account Manager, who will guide you through the set up and help you enable the online booking features that best suit your requirements.
The following are the top uses of BookingLive in the public sector:
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Activity bookings
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School meeting bookings
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Waste collection bookings
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Registrar bookings
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Course or Event bookings
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Meeting bookings
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Leisure bookings
Why choose BookingLive?
At BookingLive, we’re experienced at working with local authorities and believe our system is the best fit as we aim to meet all of your needs.
Alongside this, BookingLive boasts a whole host of features such as complete booking management, reports and excellent account management training tools and support. BookingLive also allows your customers to fill out their own information to ensure that all information you need to collect is correct – this will therefore increase the overall accuracy of your data to ensure that those reports you will be producing are accurate.
Another major issue for councils and other public-sector businesses is customers forgetting to arrive to appointments and bookings. It puts an immense strain on staff, who prepare for customers only to have them not arrive. That’s why BookingLive automatically reminds customers that their booking is coming up. It’s just another public-sector first feature of our online booking platform.
Working alongside public-sector businesses, we’ve also found that security is of vital importance, That’s why all of our servers are PCI compliant and enjoy regular data backups and SSL enabled technology, to offer clients absolute security confidence. That’s backed up by mandatory HTTPS on every page with BookingLive embedded and carefully structured servers, which ensure that in the case of a breach for one customer, the other customers remain protected.
By incorporating a BookingLive system into your organisation or department you can break free of the time and expensive of outdated booking systems, and all at cost effective rates within commonly found tender thresholds.
BookingLive: Find out more
To find out more about BookingLive’s scheduling system and its partnership with organisations going through digital transformation, and how BookingLive can bring its 10+ years of successfully servicing the public & private sector to support you with your department’s digital goals, please contact us via email, sales@bookinglive.com or call +44 (0)117 933 8632 to speak with one of our Solutions Specialists.
Are you reading this because you want to understand how BookingLive can help your council? Take a look at Cambridgeshire County Council and other case studies here.
Get started with a FREE online scheduling & booking automation system today
Claim a free mobile-first online booking system account below, this system is free to use, simple to set up and if you want to take and automate your payments through the system it’s pay as you go with a 2.4% charge covering your Stripe and payment fees as and when you take a payment. We are supporting thousands of business owners across 74+ countries with PAYG online booking automation systems. With your free account, you can set up your products and services in under 5 mins and have your bookable items live and ready for customers to purchase 24/7 on any device from anywhere. If you want to take payments through your online booking & scheduling system it is charged PAYG meaning that a small percentage is charged per sale made.
This flexible risk-free solution provides small business owners with an industry-leading customer experience, automation of administration tasks, automated payment handling and it doesn’t cost anything until you make a sale.