The current pandemic forced many golf clubs that they should start taking their golf operations’ (including tee time booking) digitalization seriously. If you have read John P. Kotter’s book Leading Change, you might say the COVID-19 pandemic could/is establishing a sense of urgency among golf club managers.
“Establishing a sense of urgency is crucial to gaining needed cooperation. Visible crises (=COVID-19 pandemic) can be enormously helpful in catching people’s attention and pushing up urgency levels.”
As a result of the current crisis, consumer behavior has already changed. Touchless technologies are gaining momentum.
Our guests and members are appreciating a lot if we provide exceptional digital services, experience, channels, and operations.
According to Gartner, by 2020, 85% of all customer interaction with brands will happen without any human interaction, using only self-service digital interfaces, chatbots, and virtual assistants.
In short, if you are running your golf club tee time booking in an old-fashioned way (e.g., via telephone & paper-based), you are missing out.
The most recent report I read was Altimeter’s The 2020 State of Digital Transformation. I found in this report that the TOP4 drivers of digital transformation are:
- Increase productivity to streamline operations (35%).
- Ensure that technology and data better support operations (35%).
- Working in a more agile, flexible way to take advantage of opportunities.
- Response to COVID-19.
Digitalizing your golf club tee time booking task
I do not want to scare you with this, but rather to highlight the importance of digitalizing your golf club tee time booking task.
A few years ago, I helped several Hungarian golf clubs to digitalize their tee time booking service by implementing a well-known Canadian golf club management software.
Since then, I have been searching for new software solutions that can be implemented within a day and do not require a club manager to be an IT expert. In short, it should be a no-brainer & can be implemented fast.
Not so long time ago, I discovered Golf-booking.com. It helps you to make the first steps in online tee time booking of your golf club within an hour and improve the customer experience available in your golf club. Not to mention, your employees will appreciate it too.
Those who already use online tee time booking solutions worth considering it and compare them. You will see soon that the usage of Golf-booking.com will not necessarily require staff training as it is so simple.
Online golf club tee time booking system in 5 steps
Can you imagine that you can implement an online tee-time booking system in 5 steps within an hour? Yes, it is possible!
These are the 5 steps:
- Check golf course basic settings (e.g. time zone, currency, opening hours): Settings/Golf Course Configuration/Time manager. You can even add online golf cart booking.
- Green fee pricing rules: Settings/Golf Course Configuration/Choose Golf Course
- Set your memberships: Settings/Membership – here you can add all of your membership categories (e.g., individual membership, 7 days memberships, 5 days memberships, social membership, corporate membership, etc.). Each product can have many variants with many different prices. You can even define green fee prices of each golf course and days for the membership categories. It is possible to create variants within each and every membership (product) type with many different prices.
- Import new users – all you need an excel file with your customer information. After this you can always edit your customers’ data in the Club members/”My users” list. Here you can also check if your clients activated their online account or not. In the “My users” list you can add the relevant membership category to each and every contact.
- Activate online account – Send activation emails to your contacts.
In the Settings menu, I found a “tag manager” that will help you categorize your contact not only by their membership categories but also by other aspects (e.g., golf society membership).
There is also a Planner menu where your colleagues (e.g., PGA Pro) can check the bookings of other services of the golf club (e.g., Trackman simulator, driving range bay with Toptracer, etc.).
You can control what menus and reports your colleagues can access. Last but not least, you are the data owner when you are using Golf-booking.com for online golf club tee time booking.
One last piece of good news. Your guests will also be able to book tee times by using the software’s mobile application (both iOS & Android).
This article is brought to you by Golf Booking Software.