Marketing module / better duplicate checking/ macros / spell checker

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!

Marketing

Hello, in terms of associating extra data with clients AyaNova v3 has two features which might be very helpful, you can define up to 10 custom fields, label them how you like and store up to 4000 characters in them (if they are flagged as text fields). They are really meant to not be used to hold an unlimited amount of data, more like the regular fields only customizable how you wish. However many objects including clients support a documents feature which allows you to link to an unlimited amount of documents in each record. A “document” is actually an URL, be it a file such as a spreadsheet, or internet link etc. I can envision you having a link perhaps to a marketing document of some kind for each client in cases where the data is going to be enormous or open ended, however for things like how the client heard of you etc, that’s probably best to simply use a custom field for since it’s fully reportable etc from within the program. So you could set the Custom1 field to be labelled “Source” or “how they heard of us” whatever the right term is, set it as text and in the user interface it will show exactly that. Then in a report you can use that field and it will also appear in the report the same way you have set it to be labelled in the program.

Mailing lists could be easily added at a later date but are not part of the initial release, however, as always there are so many options that there might be a workable way to do it now, for example. Let’s say you have no use for the new “Client group” field we’ve added to group clients on an ad-hoc basis. Since the labels of all fields in AyaNova v3 are customizable you could rename “Client Group” to “Marketing list” so that it displays as Marketing List in the user interface and on reports, then use that as your basis for doing marketing lists. Since that field appears in all the client lists and will now show as “Marketing group” you can easily filter or sort by it for doing a report that you designed that is a mailer. This would mean you could create a report for doing a mailing list without the need to export out to another program. However if you do want to export that data then you can simply create a very basic report with the data on it and export it to .xls or .txt files for processing elsewhere.

It should be noted that since AyaNova v3 will have a full developers API that will be based on very easy to use business objects you could very likely simply do your marketing documents in MS Word for example, but use code in Word to access the business objects in AyaNova v3 and do a mail merge that way. We have it on the list to make some examples showing how to do this kind of thing. We haven’t had a chance to discuss or showcase the developers API much yet, but it will fundamentally change everything for power users to do things they never would have been able to before without very complex tasks involving working with the database. For example if you wanted to get a client and all their contacts and work with it in code behind a spreadsheet it’s about 3 lines of code to do that.

A lot of the new features are highly customizable so it’s very possible that there is something that can be customized to fit a lot of needs that we haven’t anticipated. That being said if it isn’t a match after you try it out we can certainly look at adding a dedicated feature. Getting more billable hours is definitely within the scope of service management and we will be positive to any new feature that allows the user to get more hours, retain clients etc etc.

Detecting duplicate names and addresses

What exactly would you like to see in a feature for this? The current AyaNova expects the user to check before entering a new client to ensure they aren’t already there but has the feature to look up by phone number, name etc. This sounds a bit like trying to save users from themselves, but I’m not s

Hi there,

Regarding the spell checking - try this out

http://www.rainmakerinc.com/

Worked for us. And believe me I need it too.

Peter

Hey Peter - I downloaded and installed the trial - works pretty funky with beta AyaNova v3 to notify of any spelling issues in any of the text fields. The only thing is - it watches every text field - so when entering new Client’s names, or parts names, etc, one would have to add each unique name to the dictionary or press ESC to ignore - but one would have to do that with any spell checking routine. Did not check benchmarks on the exact affects ofperformance, as it would always be running in the background, but like I said, looks pretty cool. Thanks for the posting. Other users may find this program quite useful.

Joyce

Hi folks,

I’m the author of Spell Catcher Plus, and have been invited by the moderator of this forum to further mention our product in conjunction with how well it adds spell checking to AyaNova software.

Please visit this forum for more information about Spell Catcher, and for a link to our web site where you can see Spell Catcher operating and download a free 15 day trial.

With thanks,

John Tytler,

Author - Spell Catcher Plus

Rainmaker Research, Inc.