March Newsletter: Keeping Afloat and Staying Safe

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No one wants to hear anything else about COVID-19, but until the news arrives that there has been a significant decline in cases, it has become part of our lives. Welcome to the March Newsletter!

I bet this month has been rough, and you are probably waiting for things to get worse through April. Your business is perhaps taking a hit right now. But we have been working to help you do as much as you can to keep going, diversify your services, and still reach the people who need you.

When clients, customers and patients can’t access your services, you will see a decrease in revenue – it’s unavoidable. 

Developments in March

I can’t deny that we have devoted much of our time this month to supporting our clients in ways to keep their businesses viable and functioning through this period.

Free Setup for Clinics Testing for COVID-19

In our effort to help improve the efficiency of COVID-19 testing, and keeping patient bookings organised and separate, we’re offering free setup assistance. 

When things get complicated, it’s up to all of us to help out where we can.

New Client Registration Fields

We know that sometimes you need more information from your clients when they register. To facilitate this, you can now insert an input field on the registration forms. You can choose from text area/lines, dates, numbers, and drop-down menus to collect the necessary information. 

Some services you might restrict to specific ages groups, so you would need to request a date of birth. You can also use these registration questions to determine sex, age, or any other required information. 

Feature Enhancements – Always Innovating

Every time we get requests and suggestions for improvements to our features, we do our best to implement them for the benefit of all of our clients. Here are some of the enhancements and developments for our existing features:

Service Duration Add-ons

This update has been on our “frequently requested” list for a while, and we have finally managed to implement it. Rather than inputting separate listings for the same service of varying lengths, you can now create a single listing with additional time add-ons.

One example where this is very useful is when you have a 1-2-1 service or class of varying length. A massage might be 30 minutes minimum; however, for a more focussed or intense treatment, your clients might need either a 60-minute or even a 90-minute massage to ease their problem areas appropriately.

Package Enhancements

It’s easy to create a package with a predetermined number of services. Whether you want to create a selection of different services – like a “pamper package” – or if you’re going to package a 10 lesson “access pass” to keep your clients returning, you still have to determine the services and the numbers allocated to the package. 

Now you can create an access package that will allow your clients to choose from a pool of services; you just set the number the package will allow. This development could be especially useful for driving schools and other class-based environments.

Retrospective membership Creation from the PoS

Recent updates to the membership feature mean that administrators can create and issue memberships from the PoS system, on-site. What we have done now is to allow you to create memberships retrospectively from the PoS system.

Multiple Provider Emails

Your booking system already sends reminders and confirmations to both clients and providers. However, now you can designate multiple provider emails that will receive the notifications.

Hidden Categories & Locations

When you have a mixture of internal and external functions and services, it can be difficult to segregate the two without separate systems. Now you can keep everything in the same system, but you can hide internal categories and locations from your external booking system. 

Upcoming Developments

Just because the world is locked down and confined to quarters doesn’t mean that we aren’t creating new functions and updates to benefit your business.

ZOOM integration

The world is hoping that Coronavirus will abate quickly and without much more fuss, but we know that life isn’t going to go back to normal immediately after lockdown. With that in the forefront of our collective conscious, we have begun development of native integration with ZOOM.

While we already have an active integration with Gruveo, it doesn’t have the necessary compliance required for sharing sensitive information like medical patient details.

ZOOM video calling does meet HIPAA compliance standards when linked with HIPAA compliant software. 

Tickets 

A new custom feature that we will add to our growing list is the issuance of tickets. A perfect addition to our suite of features, especially for the events and entertainment industry.

• Clients can print their tickets from their booking confirmation email. The voucher will confirm the date, time, and description of the class or event.
• The linked verification module will allow you to input a number or scan a barcode/QR code, which will verify the ticket and confirm the attendance of the client.

If they used the ticket before, it would return a message that someone has already used it. If the code is wrong, then it will return the info that the ticket is not valid for this class/event.

New Notification Interface

There are many notifications available, both custom features and standard notifications (booking, recurring booking, review requests and special notifications per plugin: membership, packages, accept payments etc.)

Instead of having to edit them from different interfaces, we’ll gather them all, along with their editing, and ‘notification sending settings’ editing (such as ‘send or not, time, from which email etc.) in one interface. Plugin (custom features) notifications will be available to edit both from the new custom features interface and the notification interface. There will be links between the two interfaces to make navigation more functional. Later, we’ll implement multilingual services.

Conclusion

We’re not giving up or slowing down, and neither should you. 

Whatever the detriment to your business, keep yourself, your staff and your families safe before anything else. When the crisis passes, and the dust has settled, your clients are going to need you more than ever.  

We will keep making adjustments and developments to make maintaining your business easier.