Unfinished bookings

Where your form loses people, and who to ring about it.

Most people who start a booking finish it. The ones who do not are the most useful thing on this screen: they tell you which step of your form loses people, and — if they got as far as typing an email address — they are somebody you can ring.

Switch it on under Features › Unfinished bookings, or with Record unfinished bookings in Settings › Booking rules. Unfinished then appears in the sidebar, under Bookings; while it is off, the item is hidden. Nothing is recorded until somebody makes a real choice on the form, so a visitor who lands and leaves is not counted.

• 1The four tiles — who started in the period, who finished (their attempt ended in a booking), who gave up and at which step most often, and how many unfinished attempts left an email you can chase. Tap Can be chased to switch the list between them and everyone.
• 2Where they give up — how many reached each step of the form in the period, and how many stopped there, with the biggest drop spelled out underneath. A step is listed once somebody in the period has stopped there, so one that everybody passes straight through may not appear. Switch between 7 days, 30 days and 90 days.
• 3Board or Table — the people themselves, as cards you drag between stages or as a table with a stage menu on each row; Can be chased or Everyone, and a search. Columns hides board columns for now; Kept 30 days is your retention setting.
• 4The stages — New, Chased, Called, Waiting on them and Not interested to start with. Everyone starts in the first; drag a card along as you work through them. Stages lets you rename, recolour, reorder, add and remove them (up to 12). Anyone in a stage you remove goes back to the first.

Reading the funnel

The completion rate alone tells you there is a problem. The step tells you which problem, and they are fixed in three completely different places:

• Picking a time. An availability question — not enough slots, or none soon enough.
• Entering their details or answering questions. A form question — too many fields, or a required question that feels intrusive.
• Paying. A price question: the amount, or asking for a card at all.
• Choosing a branch, service or who with. A choice question: what is on offer, and how it is named.

The line under the funnel names the step and which of these it is. People who are still on the form count as unfinished until they book, so a very recent attempt may yet turn into a booking.

Opening one person

Every attempt keeps the whole story, not just how far they got:

Click a card or row and a panel opens beside the board. It shows the stage (with a menu to move them), how to reach them, and three columns:

• What they did. Every step they reached, in order, with times. Including going backwards: somebody who reached paying, returned to change the time and then left has a story the furthest step alone cannot tell.
• What they told you. Every question they answered on the way, by the wording of the question at the time.
• Where they came from. The source, medium and campaign tags on the link they arrived by, or “Straight to the form, nothing tagged.” See Where your bookings come from.

Booking them in yourself

Book them in opens a new booking with everything already filled: the person, the service, the branch, the member of staff and the date and time they had picked. It starts as Pending. Booked finds the customer by their email address, or creates them if they are new. The button only appears for people who left an email address; without one there is nobody to book.

Keeping track of chasing them

Mark as chased counts how many times somebody has been contacted and when, and the card shows it (“Chased 2×”). The first time, it also moves them from the first column into Chased, if you keep a stage with that name. The note box above it takes anything the count cannot say — "Rang, no answer. Try tomorrow." — stamped with who wrote it; Add note files it, and anything typed there when you press Mark as chased is filed with the chase. Notes can be deleted; a mistyped one should not be permanent.

Chasing them automatically

The Somebody starts booking and stops trigger in Follow-ups works from this record, so the chasing can happen without you. It only fires while unfinished bookings are switched on, only for people who left an email address, and not until they have been gone for an hour. The ready-made template, Chase an unfinished booking, sends an email an hour later, then a text the next day if they still have not booked.

How long it is kept

They never completed a booking, so this is somebody who is not yet a customer. Booked forgets unfinished attempts after the number of days in Forget an unfinished booking after, under Settings › Booking rules — 30 by default, anything from 1 to 365. Forget in a person’s panel, then Forget this person, removes every attempt for that email address immediately, notes included; anything they actually booked stays. It cannot be undone.