Serving Up Efficiency During Peak Wedding Season

When it’s showtime on the big day, restaurant and event venues are working as fast-paced, well-oiled machines. Everyone has a perfectly orchestrated role to play so every post is covered.

Bringing that same efficiency to wedding planning is possible, too, even if the entire process falls on one person’s shoulders. We’re talking about you, sales and event managers.

Many of you wear a lot of hats and are constantly multitasking and working on-the-go. Sometimes you don’t even have a dedicated office to work from, but digitizing office-related tasks can make your work life feel much less stressful and much more manageable, not to mention pose other benefits like increased information security and revenue.

Read on to explore one area that’s easy and low-cost to digitize: agreements and payments.

Multitasking Made Easy

Curating a successful event takes a partnership between you and the happy couple. With your guidance, they have to make a lot of decisions and take certain actions to move the planning process forward, but getting them to respond in a timely manner can oftentimes be a roadblock to success.

Making the path from A to Z as simple as possible certainly helps. Paper-based processes, like emailing a contract to be printed or faxed back or collecting payment information over the phone to then key-enter into a pin pad, can quickly turn into a month-long process. It’s easy for a bride to punt your email or call and then forget to respond, and then feel bad or annoyed after all the follow-ups you give them.

Instead, with a digital solution like Sertifi, you can send them a single request and let them sign and pay online from wherever they are. Even if they’re in the middle of something when they see your email come in, it’s easy to stop and complete your request and then go about their day.

It’s also easy to centralize all the different areas you need them to agree on, such parking and AV requirements, into one request so you get complete information from them right away.

Security & Fraud Prevention Made Easy

Even if key-entering credit card information seems easy enough, you’re leaving your business prone to serious security risks. Imagine a bride’s reaction if they knew their credit card information was on paper that could easily be misplaced or stolen. You also miss out on automatic card verification methods that can help you detect potential fraud, such as 3-D Secure and Address Verification Service.

Did you know paper forms violate PCI requirements? This means you’re out of compliance with credit card company mandates. A digital solution can help you avoid penalty fees and meet PCI compliancy with ease. Information can quickly be collected from an online form, then every card number, expiration date, and type get tokenized for protection.

Revenue Protection Made Easy

Restaurants and event venues can experience friendly fraud when customers claim to be unsatisfied with the service they received or see a charge on their statement they do not recognize, and then dispute the charge through their card issuer before speaking to you. Better record and organization of agreements and signatures makes it far easier to gather evidence to dispute the chargeback, helping you keep the payment instead of being forced to reissue it.

It really comes down to this: if you can’t make signing a contract or making a payment as easy as possible, you risk your customers questioning what else will be more difficult than necessary.​ By digitizing and automating your workflows, you’re creating a safety net to support the fast-paced, well-oiled machine that you need to be to stay successful.