Release Notes: Q2 2021 - Integrated Messaging

BusyPaws continues to march towards aligning software with the business process of Dog Training, Dog Daycare, and other pet care companies. We continue to make updates and changes on a daily basis. While we're making some incremental changes that improve user experience, we're also delivering more substantial functionality that alters business process and value delivered. Here's a look back at what we built in Q2.

Messaging

Client communication is at the forefront of our focus to assist you with - now you can send and receive emails and texts directly from within your BusyPaws account. Text messages will originate from a local phone number based on the business phone number you enter into your account profile. All messages are held within the messaging center for quick access, as well as on each customer's profile. Send messages to everyone registered within a class, or to a specific individual. Your customers can respond directly to your BusyPaws phone number so your team can keep their personal numbers private.

Locations/Rooms

Extending our location functionality now allows you to add rooms to each location with a capacity for the total number of pets, or the total number of services that can occupy that room. If you run a dog daycare with several rooms and have several daycare services that can be purchased (full day or half day, for example), you can now ensure that the total capacity for dogs within the room cannot be exceeded. No more shuffling dogs among paper sheets or spreadsheets.

Client Booking Service Selection

We had noticed that a small portion of end users were not fully reading what they were signing up and paying for. This resulted in confusion and frustration on our client businesses. The main culprit was that the default behavior of the booking calendar and widget was to present the available times/dates for the first service in your list. We've now modified this process so that it presents a list of services with their descriptions prior to presenting the available times. We've seen a significant improvement to incorrect service selections. Simplifying the interface across the site to deliver the best experience for both your staff and customers will continue to be a part of our focus.

Blocking Times in Your Calendar

There are many reasons for adjusting a regular schedule, like a vacation or special event. You can now use the Exception Calendar to block out days or hours from your calendar to ensure that your clients cannot self-book into those times. With this, we've also added blocks for pre and post booking so that you can pad times between your appointments, if you wish.

Calendar Filters

With a large number of bookings and services, your calendar can quickly become difficult to sort through and identify what needs action now. Your staff might spend more time looking a the calendar than with your customers. Filters have been added to quickly sort and display only the bookings relevant to the filter. There are three categories that can be filtered: Location/Room, Staff/Customer, or Service. If you want to see all of the bookings happening in a single room, or all of the bookings for a specific staff member, it's now as simple as clicking the filter menus at the top of the calendar.

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Your feedback helps to guide us in deciding what we build next to make your business easier to manage and more profitable, what would help reduce the administrative burden on yourself or your staff?