OK, for any small retail repair shops like ours, keeping in touch with customers is very important. The cost of keeping customers is supposedly much lower than the cost of getting new ones, but putting this in practice is always difficult. We have been using Ayanova for almost two years I think and we have over 6000 clients in the database so far and closing in on 11,000 workorders. No one wants to manage multiple lists of client names and addresses, and who wants to be importing and exporting lists between programs if they don’t need too. I have tried it and it is a big pain.
It sounds like you already are adding the capability for user defined fields in certain areas of AyaNova v3 , so maybe I will be able to create something like this myself, but what would be NICE (since you are asking!) would be a mail or email marketing module or add on or something that would allow us to do the following:
Provide the ability for user defined fields in the clients screen so we can predefine things like how the client heard about us, why they chose us, why they don’t use us any more, customer satisfaction data, etc. This is valuable info that can be quantified and associated with each client so that at any given time I can see where customers are coming from, why they are here, if they are leaving and why, if changes we make are working, etc. At the moment we just fill that info as text in client notes, but that doesn’t make creating a report out of the info very easy.
A great list module would assign clients to multiple mailing lists and track mailing list activity, such as all clients, clients who have done business in the last 6 months, clients who heard about us in the yellow pages, cleints who had a bad experience, etc.
Also if you could make it easier to detect duplicate names and addresses that would be great.
Easy export of the client contact info based on mailing lists described above would allow us to easily create mailings based on the valuable info that Ayanova already contains without having to manage a contact database seperately
I understand you are not writing accounting software so there are really no accounting features in Ayanova, and by the same token maybe you are not in the marketing business, but if this is the case, will the database used by AyaNova v3 be able to accomodate access and cahnges by other programs?
At the moment many of the the things we do in Ayanova are repetitive and to say that Ayanova is clicky is an extreme understatement. What I have done is use Macro Express to create quite a few macros to automate repetitive tasks such as adding workorder required detailed / itemised items and associated parts and labor costs, and also to add common blocks of text in workorders, create workorder templates, all sorts of things really. Maybe adding macros would be a bit difficult, but at least make sure it is still macro friendly so things like Macro express still work!
Oh! One more thing I guess, a spell checker for any text fields??? PLEASE???
Thanks!