Registration

Your organisation must be registered to use the SIS online booking service (eLangserv) before you can start using it to request interpreters. In order to register your organisation, you will need to identify at least one member of staff to act as main booking contact for your organisation and provide their name, position. The main booking contact will be responsible for holding the Login ID and password and sharing them with other members of staff in your organisation. They will receive confirmation email when we issue/reset a password or when the password is changed either by them or one of their colleagues. To start the registration process, please click here.

Making a new booking

Click “New Booking”  to open a form and request an interpreter. This is a simple interactive form. You will need to fill all the required details in order to submit:

 

 

Type of Interpreting: Select the type of interpreting from a list – Face to Face, SIS Group Call, Telephone Interpreting or Video Interpreting

Language: Select the Language from a list  if the language you’re after is not listed, please verify the language with the service user and contact the SIS team on 01273 702005.

 

 

Booked by: Select your name or the name of the person submitting the request. Once an interpreter has been secured, confirmation will be sent by email to the person selected here. If your name is in the list, you may need to fill in or correct your Job Title, Telephone number and Email address. You will only need to do this once (unless you change details) as the details will be saved securely once you’ve submitted the form. If your name is spelled incorrectly, please contact us to rectify.

 

If your name is not on the list you can click on “Add a name” and you’ll be able to fill in your details in a simple pop up form.

 

 

PO Number: This may be required depending on contractual arrangements with your organisation. If required, you will need to indicate the reference of the corresponding Purchase Order.

 

Appointment With: Select / Add the name of the practitioner / person who will meet with the service user / patient in the same way as described above. If the person seeing the service user is the same as the person submitting the request, select “Same as Booking Contact”.

 

 

Service User Details: Select from a list of Service Users who speak the selected language and for whom our records show they have accessed your services previously. Please note it is quite common for name spelling to vary from one service to another, particularly for those languages that don’t use a Latin script.
For Telephone or Video interpreting please enter the Service User’s mobile phone number.
Please enter/rectify the Service User’s Postcode if known. If the service user is not in the list, please click on “Add New Service User” and provide as full details as possible in the pop-up.

 

 

Job Date, Time & Duration: You can select a date by clicking on the icon just right of the Job Date box. Please note you need to allow a minimum of two working days when booking online a note at the top of the screen indicates the earliest booking date allowed.

 

 

Select a Time: (Important note: 24hr clock format is used for time) and approximate duration.

 

 

Location of meeting: The Location of Meeting is defaulted to the address we have on record for your organisation. If this isn’t your main address or there’s an error, please contact us to rectify. If the address is different from the default address, you may select the address from a list of previously used addresses or type one in. NB: Please always make sure the address doesn’t already exist in the same or slightly different format before typing in an address.

 

Interpreter Gender Preferred: Where applicable, you may specify the preferred / required gender of the interpreter. NB: Please stipulate a preference (e.g. Female preferred) unless the Service User or the nature of the session/service required a strict Gender match (e.g. Female only).

 

 

Special Instructions: For Telephone and Video interpreting please indicate the type of software/platform being used. Please give as much information as possible about the session. E.g. for hospital appointments, please provide the unique hospital ID for the service user. If there are any specific arrangements or anything we need to be aware for the appointment, please use the “Special instructions” box to tell us.

Submit the form: Please verify all the details before submitting the form and make sure you are familiar with our cancellation policy. We ask you to confirm you agree with our cancellation policy before submitting the form. You will not be able to submit the form unless you check the box.

 

 

After you submit the form: You will get an acknowledgement by email at the address you provided us (see “Booked by” above). This means that your request has been successfully processed. Our team of coordinators will send you a confirmation email once a suitable interpreter has been booked. You can also check the status of your booking at any time using the “View Bookings” button in the menu.

Changing a booking

To change a booking please click and fill in the amendments on a short form. When submitted you will receive an automated email confirming our receipt.

Cancelling a booking

To cancel a booking please click and fill in the details of the booking you wish to cancel on a short form. When submitted you will receive an automated email confirming our receipt.

View booking history, Quick Search, etc.

Click on “Check My Bookings” in the menu to see the booking history for your organisation / department including all bookings for appointment in the last 6 months or in the future. This will be displayed as a table with all the requests listed in reverse order of job date. You may click any of the column headings to change the list order.

For each Job entry, the Interpreter column will either show the name of the confirmed interpreter or will be blank. If the box is blank, we’re still working on it and will confirm as soon as a suitable interpreter is booked. The list will also show if a session was cancelled and the different colours allow you to see at a glance where the cancellation has incurred a late cancellation charge).

 

 

You may also use the Quick Search function, View the details of each entry in the list, Print a summary for a particular booking, Request an interpreter for a follow-up appointment based on an existing booking.

Quick Search: The Quick Search is a handy tool to look up particular requests using the SIS Job Reference, the date of the appointment, the name of the service user, the language or the name of the person who placed the request(s). Select the category you want to search (search filter) on the left hand side and type/select what you want to look up in the right hand side box. For Client Name, Language or Contact Name, you may type only part of the name/language, if you are unsure of the spelling or if you want to gain a fraction of second. The result list will look very similar to the full booking history and will allow you to View bookings and reorder the results in the same way as above.

 

 

View Booking: Click “View” in the booking history or quick search results and a summary of the job details will be displayed on the screen. A button on the top right corner will open a pop-up window with a printer-friendly version of the screen display and send the booking details to print.

 

 

Submit New Booking: You may place a new request based on the details of an existing booking. This can gain you some time if requesting an interpreter for a follow-up appointment or a service user you have already seen. Click on the “Submit New Booking” button at the bottom of the page. You will have three choices: No details repeated, Repeat Same Client and Location of Meeting or Repeat Same Client but different Location of meeting (Figure 13). If you choose the Same Client and Location of Meeting option, you will just have to select the name of the person placing the request (“Booked By”), the Job Date and Time. All the other information will be copied from the details of the booking you were viewing. We advise you to verify all the details before submitting the form.