Tag: Product News

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Features and Fixes -Online Rentals

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Our Development Team is constantly working to improve your user experience with EZFacility. Between major updates, we release small but important Features and Fixes that address issues and add useful new options/tools to better help manage your business with EZFacility. These changes are documented in our Release Notes, found in our Support Center under the “Product News and Updates” section.

Current EZFacility clients may already be familiar with the myriad of benefits our rental scheduling software provides; however, with the addition of Online Rentals, we aim to make managing all the aspects of your business even easier so you can get back to what really matters—providing the best client experience possible.

If you run a sports or fitness facility, chances are you have a lot of venues to manage. From batting cages, fields, ice sheets, pitching and hitting tunnels, turf fields and multipurpose areas, there’s a lot to juggle. Not only are you trying to optimize your resources while building this complex schedule, you are also tracking payments, accounting for any extra equipment services and managing instructors, all while attempting to operate all the other parts of your facility. It’s exhausting just to think about! With Online Rentals, EZFacility users will be able to take the customer experience a step further by allowing clients to book their own rentals through the Self-Service portal.

On the client-facing side, clients will be able to search for available rental time by using filters such as type, length and venue and days of the week. As usual, the system will prevent any double bookings as clients attempt to schedule rentals. Additionally, when a rental is booked, a confirmation will be sent to the client, as well as a copy of the invoice for their records.

Online Rentals will function very similarly to session bookings. On the administrative side, users will be able to manage rental preferences such as rental types, rates, cut-off times, paid in full or pay later options, active membership requirements, and more. Furthermore, all necessary revenue categories and tax rates will apply to ensure efficient and accurate reporting.

EZFacility is extremely excited to provide this new feature as we too strive to make the best customer experience possible.

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Behind the Curtains—Mike Vidal

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Welcome to the first edition of EZFacility’s Behind the Curtains series! Today’s guest (or victim) is Michael Vidal, Product Owner and self-proclaimed family man. Mike is here to give us the inside scoop on EZFacility’s development team, the product development process at a growing company and how to juggle the needs of customers, prospective customers and the team players at EZFacility.

Read the full interview here

Features and Fixes

Updated Subgroup Inheritance, Trainer Performance Report, E-mail Procedures and more!

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Our Development Team is constantly working to improve your user experience with EZFacility. Between major updates, we release small, but important, Features and Fixes that address issues and add useful new options/tools to better help you manage your business with EZFacility.

In life, as well as in business, change can be a trying, yet necessary evil; but it doesn’t have to be. With that in mind, EZFacility’s development team has released updates to better manage the process of change. These updates include changes to the way subgroups inherit edits made to revenue categories, as well as updates to the Trainer Performance Report and E-mail Campaign settings.

Subgroups Will Now Inherit the Parent Group Revenue Category When Edited

Our latest release includes safe guards to manage and edit groups, subgroups and their revenue categories to ensure revenue reports remain accurate.  When editing the revenue category of a group you will now be prompted with the option to automatically update a group’s subgroups with the change.  Please note: To have access to this feature, Subgroups Inherit Revenue Category from Parent Group, must be selected in the Online Registrations section of the Administration page.

Opt-Out Link Can No Longer be Removed from an Email Campaign

In an effort to further comply with federal and anti-SPAM regulations, we have removed the ability to send an Email Campaign without an unsubscribe link.  This will provide all email recipients the ability to opt out of any further communications from your facility.

Improvements to the Trainer Performance Report

The Trainer Performance Report has been reconfigured to include the ability to sort not only by date, but by Reservation Type as well.  With both sort options available, you now have the added benefit of a new ‘Package Type’ column that will display the package being used by the client to book into that particular session.

Addition of View Details Option on E-mail Campaign History Page and More!

Addition of View Details Option on E-mail Campaign History Page and More!

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In a world full of numbers it is easy to get lost in them. From what’s in your bank account to the number of clients that pass through your facility each day. Our last release featured the introduction of the Email Campaign History page, which, not only gives you the ability to see previously sent emails, but also allows you to report on their success or failures using numbers. With that in mind EZFacility’s Development Team has taken that concept one step further with the release of a “View Details” section of the Email Campaign History Page and more!

View Details- Email Campaign History

In the Email Campaign History section of your EZFacility account you will notice our newest feature – View Details. Our goal for adding the View Details section was to associate a name and purpose with email campaign results. This allows you to better understand and analyze the reach and depth of your campaign efforts.

Clicking into View Details will automatically display campaign result totals for a variety of industry standard email event types. These results can be broken down to include the email address of the recipient and an event time stamp that allows you to view statistics as they happen. You can also filter through campaign information using criteria such as email address and event type.

Email Results Recorded:

  • Delivered: Message has been successfully delivered to the receiving server.
  • Open: Recipient has opened the HTML message.
  • Click: Recipient clicked on a link within the message.
  • Bounce: Receiving server could not or would not accept message.
  • Dropped: Recipients IP address has been added to the blacklist.
  • Spam Report: Recipient marked message as spam.

Display Available Openings Remaining on an Online Registration Form

In an effort to make Online Registrations as efficient as possible, our latest release includes the ability to display the remaining openings available on an Online Registration Form. When your clients first view this page they will be met with the available openings remaining totals for creating new subgroups and individual registrations. For those clients who will be looking to register for a sub group, the sub-group openings will be displayed when viewing the list of subgroups.

Note: The number of available openings remaining is based on the “Max. Individuals” and “Max. Subgroups” set in the group details.

Update to Our SPAM and Security Settings

With our latest release we have made an update to our SPAM and security settings. Now, when sending an email blast, the ‘From’ field will be changed from your facility or personal email address to services@mail.ezfacility.com, while still displaying the name of your facility at the top. Be assured however, that when a client replies to a sent email, it will be received by the user that sent the email blast and not EZFacility. This change is for security reasons, and is being implemented across the industry for SPAM prevention. Email providers such as Yahoo and AOL already require this change and are beginning to block emails that are sent ‘on behalf of’ another email address.

And More!

In addition to these changes, there were many additional updates included in this release. For more details, please visit out Release Notes page.

New Email Campaign History Page and More!

New Email Campaign History Page & More!

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Our Development Team is constantly working to improve your user experience with EZFacility. Between major updates, we release small but important Features and Fixes that address issues and add useful new options/tools to better help you manage your business with EZFacility.

Sending a carefully choreographed email campaign regarding special events, news items or promotions can lead to increased revenue and a larger client base. However, have you ever sent an email campaign and been left wanting to know more? For example, what email campaigns have I sent, how many clients did each campaign go to or how many of those clients had invalid email addresses? EZFacility’s Development Team has released a brand new feature, Email Campaign History, that focuses on those very questions!

Email Campaign History

In the Administration section of your EZFacility account you will notice a newly organized Email Campaign section that houses our newest feature – Campaign History. Clicking into Campaign History will provide access to the riches that are your previously sent email campaigns! Clicking into Campaign History you will see the last 20 sent email campaigns displayed automatically. However, not only can you just view campaigns, you can also search through previous ones using criteria such as address, subject, and date.

The Campaign History list will show the:

  • number of clients attempted
  • number of duplicate email addresses
  • number of clients with no email address
  • number of invalid email addresses
  • number of clients the e-mail was sent to

Add Multiple Email Addresses to a Client’s Profile

Understanding the need to have multiple email addresses saved for a single client, we have updated the client page to do just that. To begin saving multiple email addresses, navigate to a client’s personal page and locate the email address section. Entering an email address into the field and clicking the add button will include the address on the client profile. You will want to continue this process for as many emails as applicable. After emails have been added editing them is as simple as selecting the edit pencil to the right of each email address.

**Remember to click the update button on the client profile to save your changes**

EZFacility Partners With Playergrid to Enhance League Management Features!

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Dear EZFacility Customers,

We’re thrilled to introduce PlayerGrid, a powerful new team communication and sharing service that we’ve fully integrated with EZLeagues.

PlayerGrid enhances communication and photo sharing between all sports team members through its web and mobile apps. If a practice or game is postponed or canceled, team members are automatically notified in the manner they choose: e-mail, text or push notifications.

What makes this even more exciting for EZLeagues customers is that all your scheduling data and roster information is automatically synchronized with each PlayerGrid team account. If your facility makes a schedule change, it’s automatically updated in each relevant team’s mobile app. So coaches, parents and athletes will always have the most updated schedules in their mobile devices or web accounts. And coaches will be pleased to find all their roster information from EZLeagues already populated into PlayerGrid.

Coaches also have the option to add recurring practices, or team meetings, in just minutes and invite parents to their private PlayerGrid team accounts with a few mouse clicks on the web or finger taps on their smart phones.
PlayerGrid’s mobile app delivers powerful functions to iPhone and Android devices: activity calendar, group messaging, photo sharing and schedule updates are all free. If team members don’t have a smart phone, text-messaging and e-mail notifications will keep them informed.

Certified by TrustE, PlayerGrid ensures team information and schedules are only accessible to invited team members.  PlayerGrid also works with any existing team or league website, whether it uses EZLeagues or not, and can be used to manage multiple teams simultaneously. This makes it ideal for parents of children with multiple activities or multiple children with numerous activities.

As an introductory offer, PlayerGrid will produce professional digital photo books, absolutely free, for any team that uploads at least 100 photos. These photo books are also available as soft or hard-cover printed commemorative keepsakes. And PlayerGrid will also produce a free hard cover promotional photo book for any facility that signs up by December 31, 2012.

With PlayerGrid’s web and mobile apps you can:

  • Manage multiple teams
  • Update multiple calendars
  • Message entire team
  • Share photos & videos
  • Invite other team members
  • Create custom merchandise
  • Purchase prints and photo books
  • Fundraise for any team
  • Manage notification settings
  • Designate team admins

We hope you enjoy PlayerGrid, our latest feature enhancement to ensure you continue getting the most from your EZLeagues software. Please contact your account representative for more details on how to get PlayerGrid activated on your team registration pages.

Sincerely,
The EZFacility Team

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The Importance of a Mobile App

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On the heels of our recent announcement regarding the launch of MemberMe, we thought it would benefit our clients to know the importance of reaching their members through their smartphones.
Here are just some of the vital stats that you might be interested in:

  • Mobile use in general is increasing 39% year to year, while app use is doubling year over year
  • 6.8 million iPhones and Android smartphones were activated last holiday season alone
  • Market share for smartphone operating systems is split almost 50/50 between iOS (iPhone) and Android.  All other smartphone operating systems (including Blackberry’s RIM system) make up less than 10% and have been shrinking in their market share significantly every quarter
  • Pew polling and research estimates that 35% of all US adults have phones with apps on them
  • The number of app downloads in the last week of December 2011 was 1.2 billion worldwide (half were from the US)

Our goal is to arm our clients with these facts and help you in taking the right steps to reach these smartphone and app users. You might ask yourselves, “What does this accomplish for my business?” By offering an app for your business, you’ll have a valuable tool at your disposal to help you retain members. It also sets you apart from your competition in the eyes of potential members, giving you the leverage you need in a very competitive industry.

MemberMe provides your business with a different avenue to engage members in events that you are holding, and also creates an easy way for them to book classes and share this with their friends on Facebook, turning this into not just a retention tool, but a promotional tool as well.

Feel free to download MemberMe and take a look at what an app for your business can look like. Just type in “MemberMe” in the App Store search bar and download. Here’s a QR code that will take you right to it or you can download it from iTunes here.