Prospects and Customers

Fundamentally, prospects and customers refer to the same thing. The only difference is that a prospect has not yet placed an order, whereas a customer has placed an order. In order to transition a prospect to a customer, you simply have to add an order to the prospect. Other than that, managing your prospects and customers is identical, so this documentation page is interchangeable between both.

Creating a Prospect/Customer

A prospect/customer is created in one of the following ways:

Clicking the New Prospect button on the Prospects page, or the New Customer button on the Customers page.
Through the self-registration form by the prospect after their appointment is confirmed.
Through an appointment by clicking the Create Prospect From Appointment button. This will pre-fill several fields like their name, event date, etc. based on the appointment details.An example of what your prospects page will look like. The customers page also looks the same.

The table on this page displays a list of your prospects, sorted in by the most recent first. At the top, you have several filters to help you look up prospects based on their name, type, or staff member. You can also specifically filter the list by Follow Ups by clicking on the red tab in the image above. This will display people that you have marked as needing to follow up with.

Each prospect has several actions: the green pencil icon brings you to their profile, the red trash can icon allows you to delete them, and the orange comment bubble icon displays if you have left a comment on their profile. Hovering over the comment bubble icon will display a tooltip with the contents of your comment.

The Profile Page

Each prospect/customer has their own profile page. This is where all of their relevant information is, including their details, uploaded documents, appointment history, orders, and more. Some of these features are covered in other documentation articles, so if you don't see what you're looking for in this article, feel free to look at one of these other related articles:

On the profile page, you are provided the following default fields:

Name: Full name
Customer Type: The type of customer this is, e.g. Bride or Bridesmaid
Referral Type: Where this person was referred from
Email: Email address
Phone Number: Phone number
Follow Up Status: You can mark whether this customer needs to be followed up with. Doing so will add them to the Follow Ups section of either the Prospects page or the Customers page, depending on which they are.
Home Address: Home address. This field gives you address suggestions as well.
Event Date: The event or wedding date.
Total Num Bridesmaids: How many bridesmaids are in the bridal party. This is used to inform the Bridal Party at the bottom of the page.
Override Sales Associate: This only displays if you're in the Admin role. If a sales associate is mistakenly selected for a prospect/customer, you can change them using this field.
Favorite Items: The prospect's favorite items in order to generate a quote.
Comments: A free-form text field where you can include any type of comments about the prospect/customer. These comments are internal, so the customer will never be able to see them.
Uploaded Documents: A list of documents that you've uploaded for the prospect/customer.

Contacting Prospects/Customers

The Contact action button at the top opens a dropdown menu with the ability to Email, SMS, or Call the person.The available contact options. You can disable unused options in the settings.

Emails

The Email option opens a dialog box that allows you to send an email to the person. The easiest way to do this is simply to type a message in the Message field and click the Send Email button. This will send an email to the email address that is set in their profile.The Send Email form.

After sending an email, it will populate the Sent Email History at the bottom, which contains a log of all emails that have been sent to this person. The email history table even allows you to view the content of the email, so you can see how your email is displayed. The other thing worth noting about the table is that it contains the Latest Status of the email, which allows you to see whether the email was successfully delivered to the customer's inbox, and even if they opened it.The Sent Email History form, which contains a record of all emails sent to this customer.

The other powerful email feature that CloudBridal has is the Email Templates feature, which can be initiated by clicking this button on the form. This feature allows you to save "canned" emails that you commonly send to your customers, which you can later load to automatically fill in the body of your email. When you click the button for the first time, you will see the Create New Template action, which will let you create your first template.A sample email template.

After saving your email template, clicking the Email Templates button will then display the template you created. If you click it, the email body will automatically load the template text, at which point you can customize it as you wish to fit that specific customer. If you want to edit the template at any time, you can do so through the Edit action in the dropdown. The edit form also allows you to delete the template if you no longer need it.A sample list of email templates.

SMS Messages

CloudBridal supports both sending and receiving SMS messages. Clicking the SMS Messages button will bring up the message history between you and a customer.The SMS message history between you and a customer/prospect.

Sending a message is as easy as typing a message in the Message field and clicking Send Message. Just be aware that there is a 150 character limit to your message, so it's better to use SMS messages for more short-form communication. When messages are sent back and forth, the Message History section will begin to populate.SMS message history

When a customer/prospect replies to you, an alert will display on the Dashboard page letting you know. Viewing the message history will then clear that alert.

Phone Calls

Finally, you can initiate a call through CloudBridal by clicking the Call button. The call is not actually handled by CloudBridal, but rather it passes the call over to your device. So for example, if you're on a smartphone, it will populate your dialer with the person's phone number. On a regular computer, you may need to configure your system to handle phone calls.

Generating Quotes

CloudBridal allows you to generate quotes for your prospects. To do so, you will need to populate the Favorite Items field on their profile with items that they wish to get quotes on.The Favorite Items field contains a list of inventory items.

After adding items to this field, you will then see the Print Favorite Item Quotes action button at the top of the page. Clicking it will open a dialog window with the quote options, where you can set a few options as well as be able to select a subset of the items to generate a quote for.The Select Items dialog displays when generating a quote.

Generating the quote will render a printable page with the quote details. This page allows you to either print the quote, download it as a PDF, or email it directly to the customer.A sample generated quote.

Generating Receipts

A receipt is generated very similarly to a quote, the difference being that receipts require the customer to have placed an order. If you need to refer to the documentation about how to place an order, please click here. To begin generating the receipt, simply click the Create Receipt button at the top, which will display a dropdown with every order that the customer placed, as well as options to print all orders if the customer has placed more than one order.The Create Receipt dropdown menu

At this point, it's as easy as selecting your desired receipt option. Doing so will immediately generate a receipt for the customer. Remember that you can configure various receipt settings such as the text, which you can refer to in the Receipt & Quote Settings documentation.

Bridal Parties

CloudBridal allows you to track the members of a bridal party together for situations where members of the bridal party all place an order at your store. When you create a customer/prospect, they will automatically be placed into a bridal party of just themselves, which you can see by expanding the Bridal Party at the bottom of their profile page.A sample bridal party of one customer

Members can be added to a bridal party through the Add to Bridal Party functionality at the bottom right of this section. You can add either existing prospects/customers to the party, or even create new members of the party directly by typing in a name and clicking the Create New Customer button that will appear.Creating a new customer directly through the bridal party interface

Any time you modify the bridal party, you will see an alert notifying you to click the Save button in order to apply your changes, so don't forget to do so.The save changes alert when modifying the bridal party

After creating your bridal party, you can now hop between members by clicking their names. Whenever you click a name, you will go into the profile page of the person you clicked.

You can manage the Order Status of all bridesmaids within a bridal party all at the same time since you will generally batch together the entire order together with the same vendor. You can do this by clicking the Bulk Update Order Status action button, which brings up an interface that allows you to change the status as well as the respective date fields for that status.The Bulk Update Order Status interface

Finally, the bridal party interface also allows you to generate the following documents:

Bridal Party Summary: Contains a list of bridal party members and all of their orders.
Bridal Party Receipt: This is equivalent to selecting the All Orders (Combined Receipt) option for a regular receipt, but across the entire bridal party at the same time. Each member of the bridal party will receive a receipt for their own orders.