Community News - June 23
Introduction:
In this section, we’ll share the latest updates from the bookinglab local gov community.
The goal here is to inform you of any product updates or community-led initiatives & help you connect with councils tackling common challenges.
The top five news stories from June include:
- Our new product suite
- The launch of West Sussex County Council's HAF Booking Service
- The Launch of Essex County Council's Short Breaks Booking Service
- We’re offering free consultation workshops
- We’ve launched a free trial environment
Our New Product Suite.
Over the past 18 months, we've worked with our local gov community to co-produce off-the-shelf products for several key service areas, including:
- A Holiday Activities & Food (HAF) Programme Booking Service
- A Short Breaks & Activities Booking Service
- A Sports Pitch Booking Service
- A Desk and Room Booking Service
- A Pool Hire Booking Service
- A HWRC Booking Service
- A Pest Control Booking Service
- A Bulky Waste Collection Booking Service
- A Family Hubs Booking Service
- A DofE Booking Service
- A Registrars Booking Service
- A Training Course Booking Service
- A Market Trader Booking Service
- A DBS Booking Service
- A Car Parking Booking Service
- A Flexible Appointment Booking Service
- A Flexible Event Booking Service & more
These products are all categorised into Gold, Silver & Bronze tiers depending on several variables, including:
- Build complexity
- The volume of service demand
- Level of integration
- Custom functionality
And why have we decided to productise?
- To reduce the time to value
- To standardise (where possible) across core service areas &
- To reduce the cost to serve
This was just a super quick introduction. We'll post more on this over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for updates.
Alternatively, if you’d like to find out more - click here
West Sussex County Council’s HAF Booking Service Goes Live.
Over the last two months, we've worked with West Sussex County Council to co-produce a digital booking service to improve the delivery of their HAF Programme.
In the short time the platform has been live, we've seen some fantastic results, including:
- 2,255 bookings made in the first 48 hours
- 50+ registered activity providers
- Over 1,000 bookable activities
Other notable benefits include:
- Efficiency savings generated through automated & streamlined processes
- Improved reporting capabilities &
- 24/7 self-service capability for users & providers
With this in mind, we'd like to say a huge well done to everyone involved in the project for developing a great digital product.
Note: these are only a few of the associated staff benefits.
So, If you’d like to connect with a contact at WSCC to ask questions/share ideas, or learn more about our HAF Booking Service — click here.
Essex County Council’s Short Breaks Service Goes Live.
We’ve also worked closely with Essex County Council to co-produce a booking product that simplifies the day-to-day management of council-provided short breaks by:
- Fairly managing access with unique identifiers, booking rules & limits
- Providing dynamic prices based on seasonality
- Simplifying payments with deposits, upfront remittance, outstanding balances & dynamic pricing
- Automating admin processes & improving reporting capabilities
- Making it easy to create/edit multiple accommodation types with additional information like location maps, video links, key codes, accessibility features & details on supplementary activities
- Simplifying booking management for multiple locations, resources & activity types
- Enabling users to self-serve 24/7 with end-to-end guidance messaging
- Allowing users to apply filters based on date range, location, accommodation type, accessibility requirements & more
- Providing MyAccount functionality to allow users to log in & view past bookings, amend upcoming bookings, pay outstanding balances & edit account information
- Helping users stay in the loop with automated comms for booking reminders, payment plans, service announcements & surveys
What’s more, resident uptake & support for this project has been fantastic, with over 10,000 page hits within the first hour of go-live.
If you’d like to connect with a contact at ECC to ask questions/share ideas, or learn more about our Short Breaks Booking Service — click here.
We’re running free consultation workshops.
After seeing the support from LocalGovCamp attendees for a more collaborative approach to tackling common challenges, we're running a series of online workshops to share learnings from our community of 30+ councils & help you tackle your self-service projects.
In these sessions, we will:
- Deep dive into your current (or upcoming) self-service projects
- Help you validate service requirements
- Share how our council community have tackled the challenges you face
- Introduce you to a contact at a council that has delivered a similar project
- Answer any service-specific questions you may have
We'll also provide you with a free pilot of a Minimum Viable Service Booking Service so you can start implementing the changes we discuss.
These consultations are obligation-free, and you can register your interest here.
Our New Trial Environment Is Up & Running.
We’ve launched a brand-new trial environment to allow you to test our range of Minimum Viable Booking Services.
These free trial solutions are only available for specific use cases & are designed so that you can see the value of our system first-hand without any obligation.
To find out more about which use cases are available as a free trial, please click here.
For existing customers, please feel free to contact your bookinglab account manager:
