The way forward... hotel booking with kayako

[sajal]

hi all,

ive had some experience with kayako long ago.. so my memory is a little weak. i need kayako for normal support stuff, in addition if need it to handle bookings...

My goal. to make a travel website which would offer online hotel booking.

Typical workflow :-

1. Customer finds the hotel hes interested in on my website (nothing to do with kayako)
2. Fills up an HTML form (maybe email form or if possible something from kayako) - this form contains various details as seperate fields.
3. The submitted form opens up a support ticket in the "travel-sales" department in kayako.
4. Customer gets email informing him of his booking... something like "hello abc, thanks for placing a booking for xyz hotel for n nights @ $33.. we wl get back to you with x hours"
5. Staff sees the ticket, if available makes booking.. if not then additional communication with customer. if all goes well... staff sends an email "Thanks for booking... pls pay by xx/xx/2007 at following URL"
6. the URL asks customer to make the payment.
7. customer makes payment
8. Kayako sends customer invoice, confirmation and accommodation voucher. <-- can this step be somehow automatized or does the staff have to manually send these documents?

Now at step 2, how do i do this? like if i use email form how would kayako know which field is hotel name and where is the number of rooms?

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi Sajal,

Welcome to the forums. Well, we don't get ideas as novel as this very often! Hopefully SupportSuite's flexibility will shine here.

# Fills up an HTML form (maybe email form or if possible something from kayako) - this form contains various details as seperate fields.

You could in fact link the user directly to a ticket submission page, with an array of custom fields (text boxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, check boxes etc.) that will take in any data required. If this is not suitable, you could create a form that collects the data, formats it and then e-mails it to an address piped into your SupportSuite installation.

# Customer gets email informing him of his booking... something like "hello abc, thanks for placing a booking for xyz hotel for n nights @ $33.. we wl get back to you with x hours"

You can create an auto-responder that responds to an e-mail sent to a specific address to achieve this.

Staff sees the ticket, if available makes booking.. if not then additional communication with customer. if all goes well... staff sends an email "Thanks for booking... pls pay by xx/xx/2007 at following URL"

Obviously, this can be done via the ticket management area of the staff control panel. You could also operate InstaAlert to notify you (on your desktop) as to new tickets. As well as this, you can create ticket alert rules to send an e-mail out to your personal address and/or as an SMS message to your mobile phone, alerting you (or other staff) to a new booking request.

Kayako sends customer invoice, confirmation and accommodation voucher. <-- can this step be somehow automatized or does the staff have to manually send these documents?

The caveat, here - I am afraid. Without some heavy customisation to integrate this with SupportSuite, it will not be able to do this automatically. The staff would need to generate the documents, attach them to a ticket reply and send them to the customer.

I hope covered everything sufficiently

[sajal]

Hi Jamie,

Thanks a lot for your help.

Originally Posted by Jamie Edwards

You could in fact link the user directly to a ticket submission page, with an array of custom fields (text boxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, check boxes etc.) that will take in any data required. If this is not suitable, you could create a form that collects the data, formats it and then e-mails it to an address piped into your SupportSuite installation.

Still a little confused about the ticket submission part.

Linking directly to ticket submission part is out of the question. Each hotel may have diferent options, imagine trying to book a hotel from a single form with 100s of hotels to choose from in a dropdown box ;-)

now for the email form... it is a little tricky. Say i will collect 10 or so fields from the user. all those 10 fields should be available to the staff responding to the query, but the formated autoresponder should not show all the fields... if this is not possible i can live with it...

[sajal]

we use google hosted email service to manage our emails...
i understand kayako can download emails from it.

what i wanna know is that can kayako use the google hosted email service for sending out emails as well? or would we have to rely on the local smtp service only?

[sajal]

hi jamie,

I have been testing your software from last 2 days... been facing some issues. and support has not been helpful so far.

would like to know if this is normal or are they having some busy time or something? if latter i can understand.

live support has kept me on hold for 42 mins now...

Tickets :
1) SALES #BRC-731783
2) BUGS #PWZ-521716

Regards,
Sajal

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi Sajal,

It looks like something has gone wrong with the script there - if you were being successfully kept 'on hold' you would be repeatedly notified every few minutes.

Please try to restart the chat, and I will look over your tickets.

[craigbrass]

I find this happens when you have lost net connectivity even if just for a few seconds (in this example at the start of the session). It just keeps waiting for the packets to return on the initial request which never happens.

[sajal]

thanks jamie and craigbrass for the reply.

just noticed that i was kept on hold for 5 hours... now i tried another chat session 17 mins n runing.
This has been happening each time i try the live support on kayako homepage since the last few days.
I must mention that my net connection has been quite stable last few days. im connected to a few servers for hours without problems all located in diferent countries via ssh, vnc, remote desktop. and sometimes they do disconnect but only like once or twice a day. for the kayako live chat each time i try i have this issue.

1) Maybe the script doesn't work <-- apparently not the case
2) Maybe the script doesnt support firefox or linux? <-- my setup is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070718 Fedora/2.0.0.5-1.fc7 Firefox/2.0.0.5 <-- if this is the case i wont use kayako as personally i get put off if some site is incompatible with us 'minorities' ill be offering a commercial service and don't want to annoy any customer.
3) Maybe it is limited to the country I am in which is Thailand <-- again 80% of my traffic is from Thailand

So in short i rule out the loosing net connectivity reason... if anyone from development is interested, i will gladly assist to figure out the issue.

[sajal]

same chat issue on another setup.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.8) Gecko/20061108 Fedora/1.5.0.8-1.fc5 Firefox/1.5.0.8