What is Enquiry Management?
Enquiry management refers to the process of handling all potential function and group bookings, handling customer enquiries and ensuring prompt and accurate responses. This encompasses everything from the initial customer contact, gathering event details, generating proposals, confirming bookings, and the many steps leading up to the event day itself. Enquiry management plays an important role in building strong customer relationships and driving long-term success.
What is Enquiry Management Software for Hospitality?
Enquiry management software designed for hospitality venues (pubs, bars, cafes, breweries, etc.) centralises and streamlines the entire process of handling function and event bookings.
Addressing various customer questions about availability, menu, pricing, logistics, or special requests can be time-consuming. Manually creating proposals for each enquiry is tedious and leaves room for errors. Gathering guest lists, finalising menus, and handling last-minute changes require back-and-forth communication. This can become overwhelming, especially when managing multiple venues or by multiple staff members, and that's why many well-established businesses of all sizes utilise enquiry management software.
The main benefit of an all-in-one enquiry management system is a single platform to gather leads from phone calls, emails, websites, and social media, eliminating the risk of enquiries getting lost or forgotten in scattered inboxes.
With features for tracking client interactions, setting reminders for follow-ups, storing client preferences to personalise communications, real-time visibility of venue space and the ability to collect pre-orders, manage deposits and secure online payments, enquiry management software enhances both customer convenience and efficiency for the venue.
Additionally, all-in-one systems can handle both function enquiries and daily restaurant bookings, including table reservations and waitlists, eliminating the need for multiple platforms and the errors that can occur when switching between them. This creates a streamlined experience for both your staff and your customers, from initial enquiry through to the end of their visit.
7 Essential Tips to Effortlessly Manage Function Enquiries
Check out our key strategies for hospitality venues and how they can help optimise your enquiry management process.
1. Prioritise prompt responses
Delays in responding to enquiries frustrate potential customers and lead to them booking elsewhere, which in today's economic climate - inflation, the cost of all basic food products increasing and discretionary spending habits (4 out of 10 consumers make small but thoughtful changes in eating out to keep on top of increasing costs), can be especially detrimental to your business.
Every enquiry represents a potential customer who's actively considering spending their hard-earned dollars at your venue. A slow response can push them to look elsewhere, potentially to a competitor who is quicker to respond and secure their booking. Therefore, setting clear response time goals and using pre-written templates for common questions can significantly speed up the response process and reduce lost leads.
2. Personalise your communication
Generic interactions leave customers feeling like just another booking and according to research, the way to engage with Australian consumers is through real-time, hyper-personalised experiences.
Here are some easy ways to add a personal touch to your enquiry comms.
Personalised forms
Include fields in your enquiry forms (website or in-person) beyond just the essentials, where you can ask about the occasion, dietary needs, seating preferences, etc. This shows you're interested in customising their experience.
Attentive staff
Train staff to listen for cues during phone enquiries or in-person chats. Did they mention a favourite cocktail or had a past positive experience at your venue? Note these down for future interactions.
Customised proposals
Tailor your proposals to their stated needs. If they mention a gluten-free guest, include suitable options prominently.
Addressing customers by name
Seems basic, but consistently using a customer's name in emails and person makes a huge difference.
3. Foster proactive customer engagement
Another way to enhance the enquiry handling process is by fostering proactive customer engagement, meaning actively reaching out to customers, instead of waiting for them to initiate contact.
To stay proactive, you can, for example:
- Provide your customers with relevant and timely information.
- Follow-up pre-event; a quick check-in call a few days prior shows you're invested in their event's success.
- Conduct a post-event follow-up to gather feedback and ask about their experience.
By doing so, you can improve customer satisfaction, help increase loyalty and build long-lasting relationships.
4. Train your team on how to manage the enquiries
Your staff might be the nicest people on Earth, but they can still lose leads or fail to upsell if they're poorly trained.
Navigating conversations, gathering relevant information or clear email writing to address questions confidently is the foundation of effective enquiry handling procedures you should prepare your staff for to avoid confusion for them and the clients. There is nothing worse than promising and underdelivering something to a client, and different standards can create a disjointed booking experience.
Use role-playing and real enquiry examples for training to make the process more tangible, and regularly practice short refreshers to ensure standards among your business stay high.
Similarly, if you're using enquiry management software, you should get the team to know how to operate it. A good tool will have a user-friendly interface, which will minimise the training needs.
5. Track data for insights
In an ever-evolving industry, data holds the key to staying ahead of the competition and the more information you have, the better.
Track everything from where your leads are coming from (website, social media, referrals, etc.) to the types of events people are enquiring about (birthdays, corporate lunches, etc.). Look at how much customers are typically spending per head, your peak booking times, and how many enquiries actually turn into confirmed bookings.
Analyse the numbers to reveal customer preferences, spot emerging opportunities or identify areas for improvement and make changes based on insights, rather than hunches.
6. Leverage pre-ordering
To further streamline the booking process, you could consider including a pre-order functionality at the point of booking.
With 1 in 3 Australians identifying as "special occasion" diners, those carefully planned celebrations demand a seamless dining experience. A pre-ordering system can be the deciding factor that makes your venue the clear choice for these discerning guests.
Here's how it simplifies the experience:
- Convenience for customers - Guests appreciate choosing meals in advance, especially for groups, and it allows for easy accommodation of dietary needs, which is increasingly important to diners. Research shows a significant portion of Australians have specific dietary preferences.
- Operational efficiency for you - Pre-ordering takes the guesswork out of event day prep, giving your kitchen a clear roadmap. This means less food waste, happier staff, and a top-notch dining experience for guests.
- Upselling opportunities - Suggest tempting upgrades or perfectly paired drinks on your pre-order forms to increase revenue and make those special occasion meals even more memorable.
7. Centralise your enquiries with specialised software
Implementing the strategies we've outlined will undoubtedly streamline your function booking process, but if your business receives a high volume of enquiries, or you manage multiple venues, even the best practices can become overwhelming. That's where specialised enquiry management software becomes essential.
Using enquiry management software, you can:
- receive instant notifications of new enquiries across all channels, ensuring you never miss an opportunity to connect with potential clients.
- create personalised proposals in minutes, using customisable templates, automated calculations, and stored client preferences for a professional and efficient process.
- access valuable data on profitable event types, lead sources, and customer trends, empowering you to make informed business decisions.
- offer clients a secure and convenient booking experience with PCI-compliant payment processing and the ease of e-contracts.
- effortlessly manage complex events, with real-time availability tracking across multiple venues and one-click access to function sheets and place cards.
How can Access Collins help?
Did you know that Access Collins offers an enquiry management tool as part of the reservation and event management system? Giving you the ability to manage all event enquiries, our system can help improve your conversion rate by an average of 24%.
Book a demo today to find out how thousands of businesses using Access Collins to:
- centralise and streamline - never miss a lead with a single platform for all enquiries and say goodbye to forgotten emails and scattered notes.
- stay on track - set reminders, track enquiry progress, and collaborate seamlessly with your team for a smooth booking process.
- secure client trust - offer PCI-compliant payments and streamline paperwork with e-contracts for a hassle-free experience.
- manage multiple sites with ease - effortlessly search availability across your venues and optimise bookings.
- enhance the guest experience - simplify the event planning process with pre-ordering, digitised menus, and one-click function sheets.
- streamline payment and paperwork -issue invoices and VAT receipts and manage e-contracts directly within the platform.
- optimise communication - centralise all client communication with fully integrated email management, keeping everything linked to the booking for easy reference.
- automate time-consuming tasks - generate function sheets, run sheets, and kitchen orders automatically, freeing up your staff for other essential tasks
At Phone Bookings Service we utilise Access Collins to manage functions for our clients. We service a range of restaurants across Australia managing their in-house functions. My team and I use Collins constantly all day long and we absolutely love it. When I set this service up, I did extensive research into different function management software options that were available and Collins really stood out as a superior platform, in my opinion. We have been so happy with it, my whole team loves it. Whenever I onboard a new staff member, they are always impressed with its functionality in terms of managing functions and wish they knew about it sooner. It is like a reservation system and CRM combined with specific functionality that makes managing functions efficient and smooth at a fraction of the cost of other programs I researched. The support is also fantastic, they really went above and beyond to assist me in learning how to best set everything up for my business.
Misty Kunze
Director of Phone Bookings Service
Book a demo or download our brochure and find out how our menu reservation and event management software can help you streamline processes, centralise communication, and secure bookings – all in one easy-to-use platform.