Welcome
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Welcome to our latest edition of Book-It News where we hope to
keep you regularly updated with news about Book-It product developments
as well as other complimenting products and services. In this edition you will hear about our
latest maintenance release and our newly released web software.
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We also discuss how developments for
Book-It 4.0 are progressing, improvements that we are making to our support
services and web site and highlight a number of ways that you can help
us to help you with your Book-It software.
If you would like to see anything specific in future editions of our
newsletter please feel free to
contact us.
Paul Herschell
Managing Director |
Book-It News
Questionnaire Results
Thank you to all the customers who were kind enough to complete the
development questionnaires that were sent to them earlier this year. The
response was excellent and all your feedback is playing a key part in the
shaping of future versions of our Book-It software. Congratulations to Martin Whalley of Spice Manchester
who was drawn at random as the winner of our competition and who will receive
a credit to the value of £300 redeemable against Book-It upgrades.
If you did not complete the questionnaire previously, we would still welcome
your feedback even at this stage. Click
here to download a copy of our questionnaire if you would still like to
complete one and return it to us.
Book-It On-Line Developments
Since the launch of our Book-It On-Line module earlier this year the new
module has received great interest. Customers using the module have provided
great feedback about the module and particularly about the dramatic decrease in
administration in the office as members book events themselves.
Book-It automatically imports the bookings and their on-line payment
service provider automatically processes their credit card payments. The system
has now been enhanced to also provide on-line joining and on-line member
renewals and many requests have been received for additional features which
should ensure that the product improves dramatically over the coming months.
Click
here to see a working demonstration of the software or
here to read more about the software.
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New
Facility / Room / Equipment Booking
Developments
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for event booking, also have demands for facility booking. For some
of these customers it might be features to allow the booking of
rooms for hours, days or weeks at a time. For others it might be the
booking of chalets, hotel rooms or perhaps squash courts, football pitches etc.
For some it might even be the booking of certain items of equipment.
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Over the last few months we have been busy looking at these
requirements and putting together a development that will allow customers not
only to define an unlimited number of items that they have available for
booking, but also to allocate specific booking times, dates and periods and to
mix and match as many items as they choose. A scheduler is being developed to
quickly show the availability of each item. Booking processes, payment
collections, booking history etc similar to the ones you are already familiar
with in Book-It 3.0 are being developed around the new features.
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Other Book-It 4.0 Developments
Work on other Book-It 4.0 features are also
continuing. HTML email development is now complete (this email was sent
to you using Book-It 4.0 beta facilities). Many new user defined fields
have been added including date fields, numeric fields and variable
length note fields. There is now a calendar picker tool to help with all
date selections. A reject button is available to quickly reject enquiry
records and a reset button to reinitiate an enquiry.
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Map link buttons are present near all postcode fields to
quickly display maps of locations. All notes fields can now be viewed in
full screen mode. Credit card booking fees can now be entered with a
single button click. All grids throughout the system will now remember
their new layouts as you resize and move columns around and the
currently selected row in the grid is clearly highlighted. |
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We are also busy improving the Book-It On-Line
experience. Now that we have moved a
weight of administration from the office to the members we want to further
improve the member experience whilst at the same time providing many new
features that will help you to fill as many empty places on your events as
possible thereby increasing your event profit margins. Many
more developments are already in progress and more from the questionnaire
feedback yet to be confirmed. A release date will be confirmed for Book-It 4.0
towards the second quarter 2005.
Support News
New Maintenance Release
Book-It 3.0g2 maintenance release is now available. All customers are
advised to upgrade to this latest release ASAP in order to continue running the
most stable and highly featured version of the software. See the Maintenance
Release panel opposite for more information.
Maintenance Release Changes
As it has been some time since our last major release and our Book-It 3.0
product has become very stable a number of customers have decided to lapse their
support agreements with us feeling that they are not having to call us very
often and they are getting fixes to any issues they are likely to raise through
our free maintenance release software. This in itself can be a false economy as
you never know when you are likely to get hit by a virus, system crash, network
failure etc that might corrupt your data and result in a bill of hundreds of
pounds to repair and get you back up and running again. Support
agreements are, however, chiefly responsible for covering the cost of producing
our maintenance releases and therefore we have decided that following our latest
maintenance release that further maintenance releases will only be issued FREE
OF CHARGE to customers who currently hold a support agreement with us as a
similar policy to many other software manufacturers in the industry.
Maintenance releases will still be available to other customers, however, a
charge will be made to those customers wishing to receive the release. Further
information will be made available when our next maintenance release is posted.
In the meantime, all customers are advised to upgrade to the latest maintenance
release if they have not already done so.FREE Support Calls
Remember
that we are still providing FREE telephone call backs to UK customers who
request them. As many of you will know, some calls can be over in a matter of
minutes, however, other more involved calls can often take an hour or more and at national daytime call rates these can work out quite expensive on top of support charges you are already paying.
Through a new deal with our telecoms provider we can now change that and contrary to previous arrangements you can now email or leave a message with a number for us to call you back on or when
you call us you can ask us to call you back immediately in order to continue the support call.
For some customers the saving on the call costs alone covers the best part of a
support agreement charge. (Please note, however, that this new service is restricted to UK national land line
numbers only and excludes mobile and certain special numbers such as 0845 and 0870 numbers.)
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Other News
Web Site Changes |
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Please note that you will shortly see changes to our web site at
www.instinctive.co.uk. We will be
introducing special 'customer only' sections to the website and within
these sections we will also be creating 'support agreement only'
sections. This is in order to create special 'value
added' sections to our website which are available only to customers and
hidden from members of the public. |
In the 'support
agreement' only area of the website we will be posting future maintenance
releases and extended FAQs etc in order to add value to our support agreements.
In order to access the areas you will need to use your Instinctive Systems
customer number along with a password which will be sent to you. The changes will be made possible through the
use of features that have recently been developed in our Book-It On-Line product
and are also available to customers who use that product for use on member only
sections of their own website.2005 Price Review
Please note that we review our prices at the beginning of every new year. If
you are currently thinking about purchasing any of our products or services
please act now to avoid our price increases.
Click
here to visit our pricing calculator for details of all current
prices.Testimonials
We receive a lot of 'verbal' praise for our products and services here at
Instinctive Systems, however, despite requests for something similar in the past
we do not receive as much in writing as we would like to that we could use on
our testimonials page to tell other prospective customers what great products
and services you are already familiar with. If any of you have anything that you
think we could use please get in touch by email or post. We would be extremely
grateful. |
New Support Team Arrivals
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... and finally - thanks for all the good wishes about the arrival of Paul and Sue's twin
boys, Reuben and Jonathon back in April. It seems like only a few weeks ago. The
boys are doing great now despite their unexpected early arrival and things in
the Instinctive office are starting to get back to normal again as the sleep
improves! |
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In order to ensure the quality of your Book-It software, we are continually improving the product, fixing
any reported problems and making minor enhancements to the system to make the software easier
to use and in some cases to add new features.
Maintenance releases are still issued completely FREE OF CHARGE and all Book-It 3.0 customers are advised to upgrade to the latest maintenance release ASAP by visiting the
maintenance release area on our website.
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We now operate a referrals scheme whereby you can earn money by referring a new customer to us. The scheme is simple, just recommend our software to someone, tell them
to mention you when they place an order. Once they have placed an order and we have received full payment from them we will inform you and ask you to invoice us for 5% of their invoice value*. The next
referral you make you can invoice us for 7.5% then 10% etc all the way up to 20%. With many typical Book-It orders in excess of £2000 this can be quite substantial for simply dropping our
name and having a good word to say about us. Visit our
referral area for more information about the scheme.
*See terms for some minor exclusions |
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Pleased with your Book-It software? Impressed with the level of support from Instinctive Systems? If the answer is 'Yes' then please let us know. We value your feedback and
love to hear from you and to be able to tell other potential customers what you have to say about us through our
testimonials page. As many
customers have said in the past, if we are successful then they will be too as our software will continue to improve and make their jobs easier. Help us be more successful by telling people about us
and if you are not happy with anything we still want to know so that we can put that right immediately. |
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The most cost effective way to receive prompt support for your Book-It software is through a support agreement. Receive support when you need it to keep your Book-It
system running smoothly. Your agreement will not only cover all your support costs for the year in one simple payment but you will also get priority over other customers, access
to mobile support numbers (should office resources be limited thereby reducing waiting times) and you will be regularly asked to provide input to new product developments to ensure that we continue to
develop the systems you want to use. Pay support annually by cheque or quarterly or monthly by standing order. See
the support area of our website for further information. |
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Several of our customers now have us listed as members on their Book-It systems.
How do we find the time to become active members of all those organisations you
might ask? Well frankly we are not active members. However, what the customers
are achieving is a very effective means of keeping is informed of what their
organisations are up to.
By receiving regular membership correspondence from them, we see all changes
to their standard stationary. We see changes to application forms. We see
different pricing structures and discount schemes. We see the kind of events
they are running and how bookings are taken and much much more. With very little
effort these customers are actually 'suggesting' improvements to our
Book-It software that will help them to run their organisations better. We have
each of them in mind as we plan and develop new versions of our software so that
new versions always contain several items that we know will be useful to them.
So go on, make us a member of your organisation today. You will reap the
benefits in the long term and it will strengthen our working relationship with
you. |
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Click here for access to previous editions of Book-It News |
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