Author Archives: arctic

>I hope you’re ready for some more exciting small changes.

1. We’ve decided that we don’t need the “group type” when we make a reservation. Mostly because half the time we’re guessing. I think that a better way to get this information is to ask them on their evaluation. Does removing the group type mess other things up?

2. The Sierra Mac invoices have information in the lower left corner that only apply to ECHO. Could you remove that completely?

3. We’d like to have a system that allows us to modify what is written in the lower left hand corner of our invoices. We’re doing 95% of our invoices by email now so some of that stuff barely applies.

a. We only need their off river plans for Middle Fork trips.
b. When we have their registration form (release) checked off in the system, it would be nice if it stopped printing that. Or if it said “received.”
c. We should take the “enclosed you should find” part off entirely.
d. It would be nice if we could edit the message at the bottom.

That should be enough to annoy you for a while!

>As usual, we were all pretty excited about this last update. In just one day, it has changed the way we deal with inquiries. Will the next update automatically remove an inquiry from the main page if they’ve made a reservation?

We’ve found a bug in Safari. When you check the blue ball in Safari it doesn’t register it as being checked. This may also be related to the other bug we found in Safari where it doesn’t show the “hang up” button (the left arrow). We’ve been using Camino (by Mozilla) for the Macs in the office and both of these bugs seem to work fine.

>The new inquiry system has partially launched. Due to the size of the update, it is being launched in parts to allow each part to be fully tested and integrated before moving on. As you might have seen, a new inquiry list has been implemented that shows inquiries in a more visually pleasing and easier to use format. In addition, there is now a follow up field that allows you to mark when an inquiry as “done” (for example, after you contact a customer again regarding the brochures you recently sent, etc). To do this, simply check the blue ball next to the inquiry. An orange check mark will then appear.

Any inquiries that you have not marked as done and that have a follow up date will appear on the home page, no matter the number. Since the follow up date field did not exist before, all old inquiries were automatically given a follow up date of two weeks from their creation. Existing users will have to mark inquiries that they have responded to as done.

The next part of the update which will be coming soon is the ability to associate inquiries with trips.

>We’ve gone back and forth on this and now we’re finding that “the last 40 inquiries” only takes us back six days. Could there be a link at the bottom of the list that goes to “last 200 Inquiries?”

>At the end of this week, a big new update will be released, revamping the inquiry system. In the update, inquiries will be expanded to have many more fields (specific trips, follow-up dates, group size, etc). The idea of this update is to make the inquiry data much more in depth and be able to track all customer interactions.

As part of the update, the create inquiry and the create reservation will be combined. Specifically, the section where you select the customer and the trip. This way, you can carry on a conversation with the customer and begin filling in certain details and discussing trips before committing the customer to either just an inquiry or a full blown reservation.

Note: There may be intermittent outages Friday as the updates are installed.

>We sent out a mailing last week and are getting back the postcards with changes of address, so I’ve been using Arctic quite a bit to make changes to customer records. Here are a couple of suggestions based on my recent use.

1. Make the [customer mode] text either go away or be selected when you click in that box.
2. Allow the symbol & in the first name field. We have several clients that we send to “Bob & Mary”
3. The delete button for “hanging up” on a customer is scary. Even the words “hang up” would be better.

>Customer mode changes everything. Now the system is much simpler and we should think about changing the navigation and some other minor things.

1. The words “home page” don’t need to be on the home page anymore. In fact, many of the titles can be eliminated.
2. Some of the helpful notes are starting to get repetitive. Maybe take those off, or create a “learning mode” that can be turned on or off that has the helpful notes.
3. I’m going to claim that we don’t need the “create customer” area anymore. Because new customers should go through the “customer mode” so that we always check to see if a customer is already in our database. The “create caller” page should also have the “add to e-news” and “mailing list checkboxes. Also on this page, the default for email is “cemail” and it should be blank.

That’s all for now. Thanks for all the hard work, Nathan.

>The customer mode upgrade, replacing caller mode, has been made. This change builds the feature directly into the design (so it takes up less space), speeds the process up and removes the button from the home page (you can no longer disable the feature). In addition, extra options like the ability to see reservations and user commands can easily be accessed from a popup box.

To test the latest version, login to Arctic Reservations and use the customer mode box on the top of any page.