Some common questions we get asked about OBA.
How do you ensure OBA will always be available to me?
The servers are hosted in a large, well respected hosting company. One of the leading server hosting companies in the world. Their data centres are staffed 24/7/365 where their technicians work to ensure 100% network uptime.
Can I email all my clients at the same time, like an email broadcast?
The main advantage of this is that you are only sending emails to people who have requested one.
OBA does have inbuilt integration with a reputable and popular third party called MailChimp, which will allow you to automatically add the names and emails of people enquiring to your Free (up to a set number of contacts) MailChimp account. This will allow you to send broadcasts to all of your contacts in the form of newsletters or News based emails.
See “Do I get full access to my data?” for information on how to bulk email your OBA customer and or prospect lists.
Will I get marked as a spammer?
Every email that is sent from OBA also contains a link to allow any receiver to opt out of any further emails from you, guaranteeing that you will never send email to someone who does not actually wish to receive them from you. Emails are routed through a third party service to allow you to track deliverability of each email. The main advantage of this is that there are staff whose job it is to keep the servers clean, and prevent emails from being marked as spam.
Do I need to set this up myself?
If you don’t have a webmaster then we will see how we can help set it up for you. We may even be able to do the set up on your website for you, depending on how your website was created, and where it is hosted. This setup is free when you sign up for a yearly account, or included in the £25 set up fee for monthly users.
What support do you provide?
1) There are helpful video tutorials in the help section of your control panel – showing you step by step how the features of OBA work.
2) You can leave our technical support team an email message requesting assistance directly from your control panel. This will then be dealt with as soon as possible and a reply sent back to you.
3) Live Help is available when a member of our technical team is online (during normal work hours, and quite often out of hours as well) – this works similar to MSN or Facebook Chat where you can send and receive messages instantly, direct from your control panel. The operator will have access to your account if you need further help.
We also have an email address that is monitored for support requests, helping you set up and use OBA to give you the best results possible.
Is my data secure?
OBA uses SSL encryption between the servers and users computers so that all the data is safe.
Your client information is only accessible via your control panel, by people who have your username and password, so make sure these are kept secure.
The whole website along with all your user data is backed up daily, with a 2 week retention (meaning there are 2 weeks worth of backups at any given time.) The hosting company are staffed 24/7/365, which means if in the highly unlikely event that the site goes down, or your data is corrupted at any time, day or night, it can be recovered from the latest backup within minutes.
There is also the facility to download all of your user data in a .csv format, to allow you to keep your own backup of your data.
Your data is therefore very safe and secure when you use OBA.
Do I get full access to my data
This exported file can then be loaded into a spreadsheet or database application for offline use. You could very simply import this information into a newsletter or email broadcast software, to allow you to send bulk emails to your customers and prospects, if you so wish.
What resources does OBA have?
These resources make this system very robust and versatile when managing your critical bookings effectively and efficiently.