Guide Management

With Guide Management you can easily set up guide schedules and assign guides to specific experiences with Xola. Once a guide is assigned to an experience they are notified via email and receive the roster 24 hours prior to the experience, so it's fresh in their mind. Guides can sync their assigned schedule with any calendar software, so they are always in the know. You can also help your customer get to know your guides by adding their bios and information in the confirmation and reminder emails they are sent. 

---

What's covered in this article:

• Adding a New Guide
• Adding Guide information and schedule
• Guide permissions and preferences 
  • Permissions
  • Email Confirmation
  • Preferences
  • Sync Guides and Xola calendars
• Assigning Guides to rosters
• Displaying Guides information in emails to customers

---

Adding a New Guide

To add a new guide to your Xola account:

1. Navigate to Resources > Guide Management
2. Select the Blue +Add button
3. You’ll then need to enter the following information about your guide:
   • Name
   • Email
   • Phone Number
   • Bio: The bio can be displayed to your customers in Confirmation and Reminder emails for events to which this guide is assigned. For more information on how to configure that, see below.
4. Select Save
5. Your guide will receive an email asking them to confirm their email address and set up a Xola password.
6. They will use their email and password to log into their Xola account, from here an available schedule will need to be put in place for them to view events to which they've been assigned as a guide. The following section will outline the schedule setup.

Adding Guide information and schedule

After you enter in the guide's basic information, you will be able to add more information about your guide, and their schedule.

Also, some of your guide’s information can be configured to display to your customers in Confirmation and reminder emails for events to which this guide is assigned to.

Guide Information

Name: Guide names are displayed when you go to assign that guide to an event, and can also be displayed to your customers in Confirmation and reminder emails for events to which this guide is assigned to.

Email: This is the email that guides will use to log in and receive notifications from Xola

Phone Number: Guides can input their number to receive an SMS message when they have been assigned and unassigned from an event. (SMS is setup under Settings > Notifications)

Bio: This can be displayed to your customers in Confirmation and reminder emails for events to which this guide is assigned to.

Photo: This can be displayed to your customers in Confirmation and reminder emails for events to which this guide is assigned.

Guide Schedules

You can configure schedules for your guides that determine when they can and cannot be assigned to events. (Note: An available schedule must be in place in order to assign a guide to reservations)

Guide schedules are conceptually similar to “windows” of time, in that you are specifying a period of time within which the guide is either available or unavailable for assignment.

To create a new guide schedule, select the +add schedule button. Then, follow these steps:

1. Name: Give the schedule a name. This can help you identify what the schedule represents later without having to click back into it to view the details.
2. Availability: Choose whether the period of time that you specify should allow or prevent the guide from being assigned to events.
• Available: if selected, the guide’s name will show up as an option when you go to assign a guide to a given event.
• Unavailable: if selected, the guide’s name will not show up as an option when you go to assign a guide to a given event.
• Note: if you create an unavailable schedule that overlaps with an available schedule, Xola will honor the periods of unavailability from the unavailable schedule.
3. Start/End Date: decide when you would like this schedule to start/stop affecting this guide's ability to be assigned to events. If you do not specify a date, the schedule will be repeated forever.
4. Time ranges: This optional parameter will determine what time of day the guide should be available/unavailable for assignment, for the days that have been specified in the Start/End Dates & Days of Week sections.
   • For example, if a guide can only be assigned to events that occur in the afternoon, you could set an available schedule with a start time of 12:00.

Guide permissions and preferences 

Next, you will have the option to allow your guides to create, update, or delete their own schedules under the permissions tab. 

Permissions

You can configure this by following these steps:

This setting can be enabled on a Global level by navigating to Resources > Guide Management > Global Settings > Permissions.

Note: The setting can also be enabled by the individual Guide level by navigating to Resources > Guide Management > Edit guide > Permissions. 

Here you can allow your guides to make the above-mentioned changes, and configure restrictions to prevent an unexpected update from occurring too close to the current date.

Note: If your guide's availability schedule is set to recur every day, and has a start date that is in the past. They will not be able to make changes to it if you input a value in the Prevent Guides from making changes..." section that is greater than 0.

Email Confirmation

You also have the option to require your guides to confirm their assignments and set up notifications to both yourself and your guide if the assignment is not acknowledged within a certain period of time.

You can configure this by following these steps:

This setting can be enabled by navigating to Resources > Guide Management > Global Settings > Email.

Here you can make it a requirement for your guides to acknowledge their assignments, and set your notification preferences around this.

Preferences

You also have the option to allow guide assignment to overlapping events and have the system prompt you before allowing guide assignment to overlapping events.

You can configure this by following these steps:

The setting can only be enabled by the individual Guide level by navigating to Resources > Guide Management > Edit guide > Preferences

1. Here you can toggle on to allow this guide to be assigned to overlapping events.
   • This will allow you to assign a guide, to multiple events, regardless of the duration of the event.
   • For example, if you have this toggled on, and your event has a duration of an hour. You can assign the guide to let's say the 1:00 and 1:30 tours, even though the duration is an hour.
2. You can also toggle on the system to require double confirmation when assigning a guide to overlapping events. 
   • To learn more about this please read the assigning guides to the roster section of this article. 

Sync Guides and Xola calendars

Assigning guides to rosters

1. In the Dashboard, locate the timeslot that you would like to add a guide to and click Assign by the guide icon. 
2. In the Roster, locate the timeslot you would like to assign the guide and click on it to enter the Roster. Click the Manage Staff button under Event Items.  
   • To assign one or multiple guides to a trip, click Guide and tick off the guides from the drop-down menu who will be taking out this trip.

• Depending on your notification preferences, guides will be notified when they are assigned to a trip. Twelve hours prior to this tour, the guide will receive a copy of the roster at the email address provided in Guide Management. If the tour is sooner than 12 hours away, the guide will receive the email immediately.
• To assign guides to overlapping events, click Guides and tick off the guides from the drop-down menu who will be taking out this trip. Xola will prompt you with which event the guide is already assigned to.
• If you have the double confirmation preference on, then when you assign the guide and they are overlapping in events, Xola will ask you to confirm the overlapping event assignment for the guide. 
• To unassign a guide from a trip, simply click the Guides dropdown, and untick the guide's name. The guide will receive an email notifying them that they are no longer assigned to the trip. 
• Note: If you remove all reservations from a timeslot, Xola will ask you if you would like to unassign the guide from that event. 
• If you do not confirm the un-assignment, you will see a warning sign next to the guide on the Dashboard and the Roster next to the guide's name. If you hover over the warning symbol it will tell you that "There are no active reservations in this event. You could unassign the guide(s) to make them available to other events"

Displaying guides information in emails to customers

You have the option to display information about guides that have been assigned to a given event in the Confirmation and Reminder emails to your customers. This is a great way to give your customers an idea of who will be playing a part in the experience that they have booked, before the day of the event. This is an especially useful feature if your experiences involve meeting in a remote location or if Guides / Activity leaders play an integral role in providing your experiences.

Guide information displayed in customer emails is set at the Listing level. So, to turn this on for a given listing:

1. Navigate to Products > Experiences > Edit Listing > Guides
2. Turn on Guide Information
3. Refer to guides as: Determine what you would like the section header in your emails to read.
• For example, if you are an escape room you likely do not refer to these staff members as “Guides”. You could put in the text “Game Master(s)”

Note: If you sometimes have more than one guide assigned to a given event, we recommend that you pluralize your guide descriptor to account for this. Example: “Guide(s)”

Once configured, Confirmation and Reminder emails for events that have a guide assigned to them will now contain a section with:

• The “refer to guides as” label referenced earlier in this article
• Guide Name
• Guide Picture
• Guide Bio

Here’s an example of what the email section will look like: