Introduction to the software
the software is a very versatile program, and the setup is simple because we tune many of these settings to the most common scenarios, thus meaning you may not need to change much. To get you started, we'll go over some of the basic steps needed to get your account functioning customized for you.
First, a few key concepts:
Customer Pages vs. Back End
There are two parts to IO:
- What the customer sees or "Customer Facing Pages"
- and what you see when you log into your account, which the "Back-end" or the "software" itself.
IO was designed to allow customers to get quotes and book online, however, many business owners choose not to connect IO to their website; they still use the Back End tools that IO provides. Throughout much of our Knowledge Base, we assume you intend to use customer-facing pages and automated features, but it's not 100% necessary, and can always be changed later to fit your need.
The customer interface is built from editable templates found on the Pages/Templates link on the side menu under the settings. This means that anything the customer sees, can be changed. For instance, if you prefer the Customer Quote Request Page (the form a customer fills out to start the booking process) to say "Mobile Phone" instead of "Cell Phone," you can change this, However, when you view this information from the Back End, the field will still say "Cell Phone."
More Terminology
Every region and company has a different terminology for how they refer to confirmed bookings and/or quotes. For the most part, we refer to all unconfirmed bookings as "Leads," which by default, come in as a quote status. When a customer fills out the quote form, it creates a new lead. You can create or edit/modify a lead manually from the "Leads" page, too. All leads start at the "Quote" status by default and ideally progress to the "Confirmed" status. More information on how Leads and their status work, is discussed in other topics.
A Lead is shown on the Customer tab under the corresponding customer when a new a quote is created. Different from leads, customer information is not duplicated but matched to existing customer accounts, when possible. Customers can be easily be merged if a new one is created with different information and could not be matched by using the merge utility.
Leads focus on the event details, while the customer record focuses on the person attached to the event.