It is important to understand how activities and notifications function within your Sonas portal. The Activities section provides you with an ongoing log of the significant activities that occur in Sonas, visible to all of your staff. Notifications are much more personalised, tailored for the individual user to highlight updates on the changes that occur within a specific enquiry or event. Both are explained in more detail below:
Activities
Activities provide you with a history of what's happening in each event, giving all your Sonas staff updates as things occur within Sonas. These are not personalisable for your venue and so cannot be toggled on/off. Any changes in the event’s status such as pre-confirmed or event date held will be logged as an activity in your Sonas. Other significant events such as payment due, meeting booked or any of the planning sections of the wedding being locked or unlocked will be in the activity log, but will only generate an activity alert for your venue if that activity requires verification. This will create an alert next to the Activities section in your Sonas main menu (note the number in the green box for how many activities require verification). You can amend which activities require staff verification when those changes are made, because you consider these to be more significant and should be flagged up to staff members. You can amend these within the Venue > General menu, under the heading activity setup, amending which ones require activity verifications. There are already quite a few default options selected here for your venue but these should be reviewed within your initial venue setup. In terms of managing your enquiries, you will also see that an alert can be created when an enquiry has no activity within 7 days or it becomes idle. These alerts will help your sales team to manage their potential leads in addition to planning of the confirmed events at your venue. By default, you can also configure your system to create a personal notification to be triggered when key activities occur…
Notifications
Notifications can be tailored for Sonas users, for both your staff and customers. They are personalised to the individual Sonas user, providing information on the changes occurring but only in the events that they are subscribed to. They will be shown in the top right hand corner of the screen by the bell icon. When a new notification is received by your staff or customer, a number will appear by the bell in a red box (which increases as more alerts arrive). Click on the bell icon to see a list of the notifications received. These can be acknowledged by clicking on them individually or alternatively you can mark all as read.
By default, the staff member who creates the initial enquiry will be subscribed to the notifications for that event. However, individual users can subscribe or unsubscribe to each event that is being planned in Sonas too. This allows a particular staff member to take ownership of the event planning or allow other staff members to be included in that event’s notifications to ensure they have an overview of the changes too. An admin user or manager cannot allocate staff members to an event’s notification subscription, each individual must subscribe to the event themself. To amend your own personal subscription to a particular event’s notifications, click on that event and you will be taken to their General menu. In the top right hand corner, click on the Actions button and Subscribe to Changes (or unsubscribe).
Note: If an enquiry is received through the web form and not added in manually by your staff, individual users must subscribe to event notifications as no staff members will be allocated to it as default.
Setting up your notifications
There are around 60 different activities that generate notifications for both your staff and customers, although the default selection is set at around 10 key notifications. These can be individually tailored for your venue in the Venue > General menu, under the activity setup menu. Customer notifications that are set as default provide a more general overview of changes in comparison to the staff notifications. These include things like payments due/received, or sections confirmed/unlocked but there is also a significant list of additional options that can be amended in the activity setup as above. Normally we recommend reviewing this menu as part of your initial setup when configuring your venue.
The Notifications menu should also be reviewed when you initially set up your venue. This can be found in the Venue > Notifications menu and outlines two additional areas that are not included in the venue’s general settings. The first is used to select which users are notified when an event enters a particular status. The default options for this are set to notify your admin member when an enquiry is received, or a status change to date on hold. You can add in as many users as you wish to notify of these status changes including: Enquiry, Date on Hold, Confirmed-Pending, Confirmed, Cancelled, Exhausted, Completed and Idle. The second part of this menu allows you to determine which users are notified when mail is received relating to a specific category within your venue. This allows you to specify staff users within different departments to ensure that the emails relating to them are highlighted for their attention. The different mail categories here include: Accounts, Bar, Catering, General, Marketing and Sales.
In addition to the settings listed above within the venue’s menu, individual staff members will also receive a notification if an email is allocated for their attention within the Sonas inbox. To find out more information on the allocation of emails to individual staff members click here.