IN THE FIELD — GROUP LEADERS
A group leader who works for two agencies in the same season now needs only one account. Here is what that means for your agency, from the invitation to the hotel lobby.
A group leader can work for several agencies in the same season. He travels with one group at the start of the month, comes home, and leaves again a few weeks later for another agency. Until now, each agency sent its own link, and that link only worked on the first phone that opened it. If the link got lost or the phone was replaced, the agency had to send a new one.
The OmraDesk group leader account was built to fix that. Here is how it works from your agency's side.
Take Karim. He leads a group for your agency early in the month, then a group for another agency towards the end of it. Both agencies use OmraDesk.
Karim has a single account with his email address and his password. He uses it on his phone or a computer. In his space he finds his departures, his availability, his details and his notifications. When you assign him to an Umrah trip, he is told in his space and by email, in French, Arabic or English depending on his account language, with your agency's logo.
On your side, you only see what concerns you. You don't know which other agencies he works for, and you see nothing of his trips elsewhere. In your planning, the dates of his trip with the other agency simply show as "unavailable", with no name and no detail. The other agency sees your dates the same way.
The account belongs to the group leader. He keeps his own phone number, languages, what he does (guide, group leader, imam, doctor and so on), date of birth, nationality and passport up to date. Every agency he belongs to sees these details on his staff record, and the record follows when he changes them. A renewed passport is entered once, by him.
Your agency keeps its own fields, such as his role with you or your internal notes, and he doesn't see them. He also marks the periods when he is unavailable on a calendar. They apply to all his agencies, and you see them in your planning without any note he may have added.
There are two ways for a group leader to join your team.
The first starts with you. On every package, one button opens a single window for adding a group leader. There you pick someone from your team, a pilgrim already booked on the package, or a person who already has an OmraDesk account, found by his full phone number or full email address. For someone new, you enter his contact details and OmraDesk emails him an invitation to create his password. The link in that email works once and stays valid for seven days.
If the person already has an account, he receives your request and decides whether to accept it. Until he does, you only see his first name, the initial of his surname, his role and a masked phone number. His passport and full email stay out of view, and nothing from the trip is opened to him. The search needs a complete number or address, so nobody can browse a list of group leaders.
The second starts with him. Your agency's sign-in page for group leaders carries your logo and a "Request to join the team" button. He fills in his details, the request lands in your sign-ups to review, and you accept or decline it from the back office.
Once he is on your team, you don't invite him again. For each Umrah trip, you assign him to the departure. He has nothing to accept: he is told, and the trip appears under "My departures" with an "Open the trip" button. Only joining a new agency asks for his agreement.
One thing to know before you start: an email address is required to give someone the app. Without one, you can still add him to the trip with his booking, flight and bed, but he won't have the app.
Back to Karim. It is five in the morning in a hotel lobby in Makkah. The group is coming down to leave for Madinah, and neither the hotel wifi nor mobile data is getting through.
Karim takes out his phone. The app locked itself overnight, as it does after fifteen minutes without activity. He types his password and it opens, even with no signal. He takes the roll call with his pilgrims in front of him. The roll call waits on the phone and goes out on its own as soon as the signal comes back.
The same password opens the trip documents. There is no second password to remember for the documents.
For your agency, a patchy hotel connection does not hold up the work on site. What the group leader does while the signal is down stays on his phone, protected, and goes out once the phone is back online.
A group leader carries sensitive information on his phone: the list of his pilgrims, their documents, the roll calls. Everything the app keeps for a trip is encrypted with a key that comes from his account password. Without that password, none of it can be read, even on a lost phone, once the app has locked.
This data does not outlive the trip. It is wiped from the phone when the trip ends, once the delay your agency has chosen has passed. It is also wiped when you cut access to a trip, when you remove him from your team, when he deletes his account or when he signs out. Before wiping, the phone sends whatever it still holds.
You also stay in control of the documents. If your agency decides so, the group leader cannot share them from his phone.
You invite a group leader once, then assign him to your trips. When he changes phone, there is no link to send again. He signs in with his email and password on whichever device he likes, and he can use several. In his details, he sees the devices signed in to his account and can sign one out.
If your group leaders already use the personal link, nobody is cut off in the middle of a trip. Trips already opened by link carry on that way until they end, and new trips open through the account. From the Staff page, you send the invitation to create an account to the people whose email you have.
When a group leader stops working with you, you remove him from the team from his staff record, and your agency's trips are wiped from his phone.
His phone keeps nothing of your pilgrims once the trip has ended and the delay has passed. To start, open a package and add a group leader from it.
We walk you through the invitation, the assignment and the app on site, using one of your upcoming departures as the example.