How does Bookable (owned and run by https://www.attekus.com.au/ ) compare to SpacetoCo.com when it comes to facilities management in local government?

SpacetoCo is a unique solution for our local government partners. While most software often mirrors existing processes and simply adds a 'digital layer’, SpacetoCo offers up a new way to engage with your community. The SpacetoCo customer journey has been chosen by community groups and local governments across Australia and New Zealand because of the easy to understand interface (even if English is not your first language) and a marketplace of Spaces offering the best possible selection of venues for customers (many LGs don’t like to host a buck’s night, but there is likely a local business that does).

When looking at the Strategic Plan for most councils, these documents call for:

  • An increase in sustainability (the SpacetoCo marketplace encourages the use of existing resources)
  • Community group facilitation (SpacetoCo’s unique method for managing these regular groups takes volumes of work away from booking teams)
  • Growing the local area economy (SpacetoCo as a platform can support and facilitate collaboration across the community)

In short, while other booking software is a two-year short term solution to simply ‘take bookings online’, SpacetoCo is a long-term community engagement strategy backed by industry-best tools to simplify flows and create a positive experience for all users.

We’ve broken down the top 10 features that are critical to the success of community spaces. From the customers who use space or the booking officers who manage venues, taking bookings online isn’t just a matter of picking software…it comes back to the overall customer experience.

1. Free Customer Support for those who use your space

When moving to an online booking solution that comes with live availability, automated payments and a streamlined customer experience, it's important to consider the potential increase in booking volume that may come from this change.

SpacetoCo offers free customer support using modern chat functionality, available to all of your customers who book space.

This service essentially provides Level 1 support for your customers, freeing up your time and allowing you to focus on more important things.

2. Individual Listings with SEO Growth Opportunities

Your spaces should be booked by everyone! Not just those who may find out about your space through your Local Government website, but also via search engines.

With SpacetoCo, we list your individual spaces under their own unique URL’s, and optimise the page to ensure search engines (like Google) have the best chance at finding your space.

Try searching for ‘north perth town hall’ in Google to see what we mean. You’ll notice the result for https://www.spacetoco.com/space/north-perth-town-hall quite high up!

3. Automated Refunds

If a future booking is cancelled and needs to be refunded, why should your team or finance workflows need to worry about it?

Forget integrations and worrying about linking it up to your own finance package. Yuck who wants to do that 🤮.

SpacetoCo handles this automatically for you, so the only thing you see is money for confirmed bookings. Not only that, we’ve reduced the time to cancel a booking down to 5-10 seconds, so even when COVID restrictions roll around, cancelling bookings as an extremely smooth process.

4. Bond & Security

Bonds - they are a great idea in principle, but are often a nightmare for everyone involved.

  • Finance teams hate them - its paperwork they don’t need especially when 99% of the time the money is returned.
  • Customers are turned off by it - who wants $1000 taken from their account at the time of booking?
  • Booking officers are tired of them - it's a massive process to track and keep accounted for in amongst the many other tasks they have going on.
The good news is, SpacetoCo listened to all of these customers and solved it with SpaceProtect!
  • Finance teams now don’t need to worry about bonds unless there is a true claim.
  • Customers don’t need to pay for the bond up front, and the funds only come out of their account right before the booking occurs.
  • Booking officers can now enable bonds on a booking in under 10 seconds, making it almost an enjoyable experience! 😉
You can learn more about SpaceProtect here: https://support.spacetoco.com/spaceprotect-for-hosts

5. Simplified Account Reconciliation

Customers book, they cancel and rebook, then change the day, then add more time, then change the day again…and then COVID restrictions hit and you have to cancel for them. What a nightmare!

Why should your accounts team care about any of this, or worry about tracking all those changes in their system? Wouldn’t it just be easier to worry about the funds if the booking actually goes ahead?

The good news that SpacetoCo has re-imagined the idea of account reconciliation, without the need for clunky integrations and lots of IT people getting involved. Simply receipt the money in only after the booking takes place. Simples. Plus no need to do a 6 month integration with the back-end!

6. Customer Help Articles

Making a booking should be easy and accessible. Not only for those customers who are regulars, but also for anyone just browsing around and isn’t keen to sign up for an account.

That’s why we’ve made it super easy to find the answer you are looking for with our 80+ support articles here: https://support.spacetoco.com

We updated it frequently to ensure customers can easily find the questions they need. Not only that, we integrate it into our free customer support chat to help customers self-serve when they ask a question. It’s the little things that count towards making a big difference.

7. User Experience & User Interface

Good design isn’t easy - it takes years of research, countless hours of speaking with customers, and a solid understanding of the customer journey. While no website is perfect, there are some basic principles that you can follow to ensure customers can get on with their job-to-be-done.

Not only that, facilities are often used by the older (wiser) generation who need a little more hand holding than the TikTok loving generation who do everything with their thumbs.

SpacetoCo has had years of feedback integrated into its platform to ensure we hit the mark when it comes to all types of users. We’ve released over 6,000 individual improvements since our launch, and revise the product every 1 to 2 weeks to ensure it meets our customers high expectations.

8. No downtime when upgrading the software

There is no need to take things down when an upgrade occurs - that just hurts the ability for people to book your spaces. That’s why we’ve designed our system to be upgradable at anytime - even during the middle of the day! We can push out a patch if we find something that needs fixing, and you won’t even notice we’ve done it.

9. Economic Development and allowing local businesses to list space

Why limit the hiring of spaces to just council-owned facilities? Allow your local businesses to share their space on a Marketplace, and help your customers discover other venues close by.

We’ve got hundreds of customers who have discovered local businesses thanks to their local council listing on SpacetoCo. When people share spaces in precincts, they typically come in groups. Looking at a sample of 10,000 past SpacetoCo bookings, we can demonstrate that an average of 30 people come together to share a space. On average, their booking lasts 3 hours with a typical space hire spend of $78. Whilst the local council or the local business receives the benefit of this revenue, other local businesses also receive a lift through the increased movement of people.

10. A Marketplace with existing customers

Customers can discover your spaces through the SpacetoCo marketplace, increasing the chances of your Spaces being found and booked. It’s a #winwin for everyone in your local community.

We also ensure that search engines like Google have the best chance of finding you online, with individual space listings to maximise your venues visibility.

So that’s 3 ways that your space can be found through the SpacetoCo experience - Search engines, SpacetoCo marketplace, and directly from your website.

11. A secure modern technology stack

Technology gets outdated really quickly. SpacetoCo is built on the absolute latest technology stack, ensuring peace of mind when it comes to your online bookings and customer data. Stripe, Amazon Web Services, MongoDB, Google - these are just some of the big name tech companies that power SpacetoCo to ensure the very best security and privacy for your data and customers.

How many council software systems out there
get 5 stars from all their users?

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Trusted by local governments and community organisations
across Australia and New Zealand

Explore the SpacetoCo experience and discover how it could transform your council

Grab a coffee and your team and we'd love to hear more about your spaces, the opportunities you want to create for more bookings and more time. We can show you how the platform is working at councils like you, and give you tons of ideas to help you on your bookings transformation journey. Book a demo or check out our features and pricing