November 2022 - Product Updates

This month's updates are PACKED with features. There's so much goodness here, you'll want to make sure you read it.

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At a glance, in the last few weeks we have shipped:

1. Family Accounts v1
2. Email Marketing v1
3. Staff Availability v2 
4. Other really big (but relative to the stuff above, small) upgrades
   1. Booking page mobile optimizations
   2. Abuse protection for memberships and packages
   3. "Disjoint" recurring bookings
   4. Rich text descriptions
   5. and more!

Note the "v1" for some of the features above. This means that we've just shipped the first version of these things. Expect the features above to keep improving in the next weeks!

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Family Accounts v1

Easily our most requested feature - family accounts are finally here! We know that not all kids have emails, so it becomes super difficult to know from the parent's email which kid is joining the service. Not anymore!

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Now parents can create "family member profiles" on their Swift account page, and then indicate which family member they want to checkout on behalf of. 

As a facility owner or staff, you can also assign family members on your side! Just visit the parent's customer profile page, and scroll down to the "Family Members" section. There, you can easily add folks to the customer's "family". Family members will now also show up wherever you search for customers. So you can add family members to bookings on the calendar, search for them on the customer's page, etc. 

The best part is, package credits are also shared across family members!

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PS: This is just the first version of family accounts. Over the next few weeks, we'll be adding things like:

• Giving parents the ability to see upcoming bookings for their family members, so parents can keep track of exactly when their kids are booked
• Memberships for specific family members
• Discounts for families

Email Marketing v1

Swift takes care of a lot of things for you - with automatic confirmation, cancellation, and reminder emails, your customers are always kept in the loop about their bookings.

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BUT there's a few problems with the current setup:

1. All of these automatic emails come from the Swift email address (info@runswiftapp.com) instead of your facility's email. We've seen countless times where customers reply to us, thinking they're messaging you!
2. Sometimes you have custom information that you want to communicate in these emails. Like door codes for access, or facility etiquette, or just a basic "welcome message". There's no way to "inject" this custom info into our existing automated emails
3. What happens if there's a snow day? Or new availability just opened up for an instructor? It would be nice to email customers directly from Swift instead of having to download the affected list of customers', and send an email externally.

Well I have some good news for you. Starting today, we've fixed problems #1 and #2 (and the solution to #3 - being able to send email campaigns from the app - is coming soon!)

What does this mean for you?

• There's a brand spanking new tab in the navbar, called "Marketing" (click it!)

• You can go to Marketing > Senders to add your facility's own email address as a "verified sender". Once you verify the address with the link in your inbox, all automated emails sent to customers will be sent from that address instead of ours!

• You can go to Marketing > Automations to edit existing automated email flows, and inject custom information into those emails. For now, you can edit the "Booking Confirmation" and "Booking Reminder" emails that get sent to customers, and we'll add more over time!

Visit Marketing > Senders to add your own email address as the sender for all automated emails to customer.

Visit Marketing > Automations to edit existing automated email flows.

There you can edit booking confirmation emails and reminder emails with your own custom information (like door codes or messages)

Staff Availability v2

A common question we heard from facilities was "my instructor is generally available on Monday's but he's off next Monday. How do I indicate this in Swift?" 

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This is a perfectly reasonable question, but before this week our answer to it wasn't great. Our staff availabilities in the past were "endlessly recurring" - which means if someone is available on Mondays 3-5PM, they'd be available at that time basically forever. So customers can make bookings with them 2 months into the future, even though that specific Monday they're going to be off.

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Right in time for a busy winter, this is no longer true! Go to Schedules > Staff Schedules, and you'll notice a page very similar to the Calendar. Availabilities are now on a week-by-week basis (just like regular bookings).

This means staff members can now go in and add their availability for the week, remove it for certain days or weeks, and generally add their schedule how they would expect to be able to add it.

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To avoid disrupting your business with this change, we've taken your existing availabilities and just "applied them" for 8 weeks, but you can feel free to delete or edit this as you like. As always, editing and deleting recurring bookings is all done in one action in Swift (so you won't have to edit each availability manually)

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Other Upgrades  

You know it's been a productive month when there's literally not enough space in the updates email to talk about all the updates.

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Each of these improvements deserves it's own section (and on any other month, it probably would have got it), but we don't have all day so here's a quick summary of some other major upgrades:

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Booking Page Mobile Optimizations

Our booking page always looked great on mobile, but it wasn't built for mobile.

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That changes today. Mobile is a first class citizen on your booking experience, which means it'll feel and function just like an app! Beautiful animations, sleek UI, and more.

Abuse Protection

A big concern with memberships is around members abusing their benefits. "Unlimited" cage rentals shouldn't mean your member eats up all your valuable cage time. With abuse protection, you can now set limits on members (ex: "1 free rental/day") so they can benefit from their membership without abusing it

Disjoint Bookings

A top favourite with Swift facilities is how we do "recurring"/"repeat" bookings. We've made it even better! Now you can have bookings that repeat multiple times per day or multiple days during the week at different times (ex: a class that runs Mondays 4-5PM and Wednesdays 1-2PM)

Rich Text Descriptions

You asked for rich text, and we delivered! 

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Now you can go to town with the formatting for your facility description, service descriptions, booking notes, etc.

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Keep an eye out for these beauties throughout the app

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Phew, that was a LOT

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But we're constantly trying to make this product the best tool possible for your business. So naturally, the question is....

What's next?

Here's a taste of what's coming up in the next few months:

• Reporting and analytics
• Advanced payment collection, billing, and invoicing
• Social login (Google, Apple ID) and Apple Pay
• Family accounts v2
• Email marketing v2
• and more....

To stay in the loop with the latest updates, be sure to follow us on Twitter @runswiftapp.

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