For a long time, we have been emailing MyHallWizard users with important information. For example, if your free trial is coming to an end, the application automatically sent you an email. And if an email you sent to a customer bounced, our Support Desk would email you.
But increasingly, this has become unsustainable. As our functionality expands, so the number of things we need to tell you about increases. You don’t need an email about everything, and if you did, you would soon get too many emails. On top of which, good practice says that you should be able to unsubscribe to emails. Which would leave us a problem: how do we tell you something important if we can’t email you?
So we have introduced a new Notification system within MyHallWizard. You will see it as a bell icon in the navigation bar. The red number next to the bell tells you how many notifications you have.
If you click the bell, the notifications menu drops down, showing you all the notifications.
Notifications succinctly give you the key information you need to know. And they often include buttons to shortcut you directly to the information in our system.
When you have read a notification, simply click the X icon on the notification to dismiss it.
Visiting the related record (e.g. by clicking the button in the notification) will normally dismiss it as well. This works just as well whether you visit the record by clicking through from an email, from the notification or even just visit the page directly.
For booking enquiries, it’s even better. If you accept or reject the booking enquiry, then the notification about the booking enquiry is dismissed for all members of your venue team, ensuring there are no out-of-date notifications.
Finally, if you haven’t dismissed a notification, it automatically expires after 30 days, so you are not deluged with loads of out-of-date information.
New Types of Notifications
We have already been telling you about new Booking Enquiries, when a customer confirms or cancels a provisional booking, and the end of your free trial. These notifications will continue. However, unless you set it up (see below), we won’t email you when a customer confirms or cancels a booking.
Our Support desk has previously emailed you about email bounces and complaints (e.g. spam reports). These notifications are now automated, saving us time and giving you the information far more quickly – often within a few seconds of your sending the email.
We have also added new notifications for Stripe payments and refunds, so that you know when your customer has paid their invoice using Stripe. By default, we will not email you about this but simply use notifications within MyHallWizard; once again, you can always go to Notification Settings if you want to receive an email.
We hope to add more notifications in the future, for example to tell you about changes to your subscription or your venue.
Notifications are very focussed now on who gets them. Most notifications go to venue owners, venue administrators and booking administrators (but not read only users). However, most email bounce notifications only go to the person who sent the email, and subscription notifications only go to the venue owner.
Notification Settings
Initially, you might find you start receiving some email notifications that you did not get before, or that you stop receiving some that you did receive. You can easily decide which types of notification to receive by email or within the MyHallWizard app.
Simply drop down the Notifications menu and select the Settings cog icon (circled in red in the following illustration).
Or go to the Settings screen (cog icon in the navigation bar) and click on Notification Settings. There is also a link at the bottom of all email notifications we send you.
The Notification Settings screen lets you decide which channels are used to send you each type of notification, giving you full control of which emails you receive, or even to decide not to receive some types of notification at all.
Notification settings apply to you personally; if you change them they affect your individual experience using MyHallwizard – they do not apply to other users in the venue’s team. In order to help with this, we do not normally send notification emails to the venue’s email address anymore – they will always go to your personal email address.
Summary
We hope you find the new Notifications system useful. It should give you the information you need to know quickly while cutting down the number of emails you get from us. And, of course, it gives you control about what you are told about and in what way.
As usual, if you have any comments on the new system, let us know by emailing us at support@hallwizard.com.