Configuring a location
Localisation and design
Two related jobs: making the product speak your customers’ language and use your industry’s words, and making your public pages look like your business rather than like software.
Languages and region
Location settingsLocalisation. Set per branch, so a bilingual shop and a monolingual one in the same chain can differ.
20 languages are offered, and a branch can list more than one — the first is its primary. Only the primary is used today: it decides how your business terms change between singular and plural. Nothing yet lets a customer pick another language, and your customer messages are written by us, in English, the same for every business — you choose which ones go out and on which channels, not their wording.
Currency is chosen from GBP, EUR and USD, matching what the product can bill in. It is what service prices are shown in.
Saying it your way
“Customer” is wrong in a lot of businesses. A clinic has patients, a hotel has guests, a law firm has clients. Some of the words on your public pages are yours to change, in three groups:
Business terms
The nouns the product uses about your world — customer, visit, party, waiting, serving and the rest. Today they appear as the column headings on your waiting-room display, such as “Waiting” and “Serving”. They don’t change the wording of customer messages, and the join and status pages take their wording from customer journey terms instead.
Each term is stored with its singular and plural forms rather than one word with an “s” bolted on, so languages with more complicated plural rules than English are handled properly.
Customer journey terms
The wording on the public pages themselves — the join page, the status page, the booking flow. This is where you change “Join the waitlist” into whatever your customers would actually say.
Email terms
The label on the button in your customer emails — “View status” for a waitlist visit, “Manage booking” for a booking, “Take the survey” for the follow-up after a visit. The same label is used on the button in a push notification. The text of the message itself stays as written.
Start with the join page
The words customers read most are on the join and status pages. If “Join waitlist” isn’t how your customers would put it, change the customer journey terms first.
Custom design
Account settingsCustom design controls how your public pages look: colours, fonts, button style, background and layout.
- Colour — a ready-made palette, or your own brand colour.
- Font — from a set of web-safe families.
- Button style — including corner rounding, from square to fully rounded.
- Layout and background — how the page is aligned, and what sits behind it.
A branch can differ from the account under Location settingsCustom design. It applies to that branch’s join, booking and display pages, and only the settings you change there are its own: everything else keeps following the account design. Restore to account design drops the branch’s changes. The location directory and the waitlist overview cover every branch, so they always use the account design.
Check the result on a phone. Almost every customer sees these pages on one, and a colour that works on a monitor can be unreadable in daylight on a handset.
Display settings
Location settingsDisplay settings is about your team rather than your customers: which details appear against each person on the waitlist, and which appear in today’s activity list.
The two lists are configured separately, because they answer different questions. The live board wants the few things needed to call the next person; the activity list can afford more detail.
Three of the options — tags, booked time and assigned staff — are accepted but never drawn, because there is nothing behind them yet for a walk-in. Switching them on changes nothing rather than showing you blanks.
Less is usually better here
A row with eight details on it is slower to read at a busy counter than a row with three. Start with a name and a wait, and add only what your team actually asks for.
Account-level localisation
Account settingsLocalisation holds three things that aren’t any one branch’s:
- Defaults for new locations. Languages, currency and business terms that every new branch starts with. Apply to all locations copies them onto the branches you already have, overwriting their languages, currency and business terms. Time zones and each branch’s own wording are left alone.
- Public page terms. Your location directory and waitlist overview cover every branch, so they use the account’s business terms and wording rather than any one branch’s.
- Date and time. A 12- or 24-hour clock, and whether the day or the month comes first. Automatic follows your account’s country. It applies to the dashboard, booking pages and customer messages.