12 August 2020

Introducing Notices

If recent events have taught us anything, its that being able to quickly and easily distribute information to your customers is highly important. To help with this we’ve developed our latest new feature, called simply Notices.

Simple but effective, we’ve built Notices to cover a wide range of scenarios at your yard. These include:

Collecting responses from your customers (e.g marketing permissions) .
Tracking acknowledgments of critical notices (e.g. terms and conditions).
Sending out yard wide updates (e.g. temporary changes to visiting times).

For each notice you publish you’ll be able to decide who will see the notice, optionally include a checkbox to get their response and even mandate that they have to agree before proceeding (great for T&Cs updates).

Then, as a yard owner, you’ll receive insights for each notice you publish. Meaning it’s quick and easy to keep track of who’s yet to get the latest update about the yard.

What Your Customers See

By design we’ve made Notices incredibly simple for your customers. Whenever they visit the control panel, if a new notice has been published, they will automatically see a simple popup (shown below).

In this popup they’ll see all the latest notices that they’ve yet to acknowledge. Each notice will be displayed on it’s own row and depending on the choices you’ve made they may also see a checkbox allowing them to choose their response.

When they’re ready they just click on Acknowledge. That’s all there is to it.

Creating and Managing Notices as a Yard

Actually creating the notices is nearly as easy as it is for the users to read and acknowledge them. To start, go to the Notices menu item under the Admin menu section.

You’ll see an outline of the notices you’ve created and the option to create a new one. The new notice form is shown below to the right.

You’ll be able to name the notice and fill in the content that makes up the notice itself. Once you’ve filled that in there are a few other options for you to choose from.

Require confirmation - This adds a checkbox to the notice allowing a user to select it or not.
Mandatory - This requires the user to check the box. This is useful for notices such as T&Cs where their contract requires agreement.
Show in form - This is used to choose whether to show the notice to users in certain forms (e.g. when checking out as a guest user).
Active on Roles - This allows you to select what type of users will receive this notification.

Reports

Reports are the end product of the notice system. They allow you to see an overview of how your customers have responded.

The report is broken down into two parts. Part 1 shows the users who have acknowledged (filled in) the notice and part 2 shows those who haven’t.

Within the Filled section you’ll see all the users who’ve filled it in along with other details such as their response and the time at which they responded. You can also filter by the value of the response.

On their own the reports allow you to keep track on the responses from your customers. However to extend their utility we’ve built an Export to CSV feature. With this the possibilities are endless, from doing your own analysis in other software (such as a spreadsheeting tool) through to exporting data to a 3rd party system (e.g marketing platforms) you can use the data however you need and take it to wherever it’s needed.

Notices is an example of a feature that we’ve built in part to support yards should the worst happen and some version of ‘lock down’ returns. We’ve got more ideas in the pipeline which we believe will help, but we’re also open to recommendations. If you have any suggestions please feel free to get in touch with us via our contact page. We’re open to considering any ideas you may have to help yards in these difficult times.