Have you heard about the horde of cicadas that are emerging from a 17 year slumber to have a hot cicada summer? These party-crazy insects, otherwise known as Brood X, are so substantial that they're showing up on weather radar. If you’re in the affected areas, we hope you have an excellent set of noise cancelling headphones - we’ve heard they’re loud.
Off the topic of yelling insects and over to the enhancements we’ve made to your Coconut solutions. While not as earth shattering as billions of subterranean insects, the Product, Design and Engineering teams have been working hard on new notifications for staff and location managers as well as improvements to help with audit requirements, a refreshed Report UI and something we’re calling a “faster route”, inspired by Google Maps, to redirect your customers to self-service options instead of booking an appointment with a staff member.
We also hosted our most recent Product Roadmap webinar on May 20th (let us know if you weren’t able to attend) as well as had a blast on the Sprout & Harvest podcast with Alterna and YNCU - a big thank you to Tara and Matt for joining Katherine! We would love to feature your organization and your story: email marketing@coconutsoftware.com and we’ll contact you when we're looking for panelists, presenters or blog writers!
If you haven’t yet, join our Coconut Customer Slack channel. Connect with your peers, share tips and best practices, get real time updates on improvements happening between releases and provide product feedback and ideas. Until we’re allowed to see each other in person, this is the next best thing!
Thanks for your ongoing support of Coconut - seeing and being a small part of what your organizations are doing in your communities and for your neighborhoods is truly inspirational for our team.
May you avoid the cicadas and enjoy the nice weather.
Your Coconut Team
P.S. If you missed what we released in May, click here to review
New Features & Capabilities - launching June 24th
Revamp of notification settings
We are revamping the way notification settings are configured and adding in some “as requested by you” improvements. To start, we’ve broken them into three functional sections from the existing single page, and then provided the option to send SMS, email or notification for each type:
Client notifications - includes Appointment creation/ update/ missed/ completed/ reminder/ check-in
We’ve added support for journaling every email sent to a client in a central inbox - this is helpful for those of you who have auditing requirements to meet local regulations. It is essentially a BCC of every email sent out to your clients.
Staff notifications - includes Appointment creation/ update/ check-in *new*, Lobby walk-in *new*
For Staff notifications, we used to only have an audible and a browser notification for when visitors checked in or there was a new Lobby walk-in. We’ve now updated this feature to include an email and an SMS so your Staff won’t miss a visit.
We also plan that for the July release, admins will be able to set reminders for Staff to complete appointments. This will help clean up inputs into your reporting as well as provide accurate tracking of length of appointments for future planning. Reminders will be configurable for a set amount of time (minutes, hours or days after an appointment was supposed to conclude) for those appointments not yet completed.
Notifications to the contact information specified on a Location - Queue appointment created *new*
You’ll now have the option that when a visitor joins the line at a location, the cell phone number or email address that was configured for that location (typically a branch manager) would receive a notification that someone was added to the line.
Anticipated with the next release, you’ll also be able to configure an escalation notification if a visitor has been waiting more than a predetermined threshold you've configured as acceptable.
Here is a sneak peek of what the Notifications Settings page will look like.
You now have the ability for admins to configure the reasons that a client can provide when cancelling an appointment.
You can now set up a “faster route” pop-up that will remind your clients that certain services don’t need an appointment as they can be completed immediately and online.
This is helpful for truly transactional, low value activities that can quickly, easily and (for you) inexpensively be completed digitally. Use this feature together with UTM parameters and track which users have been redirected from which booking channel as part of reporting. This will show the flow of traffic through the process and provide data points for future business channel mix decisions.
Get started with Coconut APIs faster, thanks to our Postman collections. Simply open up Postman and in the Explore tab search for “Coconut” to find a few collections showcasing some sample uses of the Coconut Enterprise APIs that allow you to integrate your systems with Coconut.
Take your Zoom usage in Coconut Video appointments to the next level with the Coconut Zoom App, soon to be available in the Zoom marketplace.
By using this app, you will be able to choose to have Coconut create a new Zoom meeting ID for every appointment instead of reusing the same Zoom meeting across all the Video appointments a staff would have. This is helpful to ensure no one joins a meeting early by accident.
Thanks to your feedback, we’ve reimagined Booking shortcuts.
You can now save, edit, name, set expirations, generate QR codes and much more. We’re particularly excited about this as it will give you line of sight into what channels are driving the most engagements. We can’t wait to see the innovative ways you will scale the usage of booking shortcuts with these enhancements!
Improvements - launching June 24th
We are introducing a new configuration that will allow our customers to hide staff members who have no locations assigned to them. This will be helpful to those organizations that have a concern about visibility between and across individual locations (i.e. franchises) in order to fulfill operational processes. This way, managers will not be able to see data for those staff not assigned to a specific location. My mother called it “minding my own beeswax.”
In cases where your recurring Exchange events are no longer properly syncing with Coconut, you can now delete the entire series of recurring events from the Schedule view.
We have revamped the look and feel of our reports page, the first phase of an overhaul of our reporting solution. For now, no changes to functionality, just a snazzy new wrapper. More enhancements to come (hint: faster and with more data) - keep up with the latest during our Product Roadmap webinars.
New Report UI
Old Report UI (So long, and thanks for all the fish)