Alpha Tracker - Tips & Tricks - Webinar #14

Jack

Hi, welcome to the Alpha Tracker webinar and we're just waiting for a few more people to join before we get started.

Dan

Yeah, we can see a few people joining now. Hi, Serena. Hi, Bill. Hey, Zac. Great. I can think, I think we've got people coming through. If you wouldn't mind just dropping a message in the Q&A just to let us know that you can hear us and see us okay. That would be brilliant. And then we can get started. Fantastic. Great. We've got some confirmation that you can see here, which is a good start. Jack, over to you.

Jack

Great, thank you. So as I just mentioned, welcome to the Alpha Tracker webinar. This is a webinar about the key features in release 41. So release 41 is our summer 2024 update. And it includes a whole host of features. I think it's got over 600 features in it.

Dan

It's crazy how many it is.

Jack

So on this webinar, we'll just go over the couple of key points rather than all 600 features, because I don't think we'll have time for that. The release notes and everything that you need to know about the new release is on our website. So if you head over to alpha-tracker.co.uk and click on latest release over on the menu here, you should find this page with our release highlights, our release notes, and everything that you need to know about the release. So I'll just jump in to our Alpha Tracker system. And the first thing that I just want to touch on is that Alpha Tracker has a bit of a new look to it across the system, mainly to do with the icons and other cosmetic bits and pieces. So you'll notice on some of the screens some of the icons have changed. So the icons look a lot more consistent as they did before, a bit easier on the eye. And there's been other styling updates that we've done throughout the system. So we'll get started on our first feature. And what we want to show you is something called quote chasing or quote follow ups. So some of you may already use the follow up feature in Alpha Tracker. So we've got some quotes here on screen that you can see have the follow ups on the right hand side. But what we've built into the system now is a way for you to chase these quotes quickly and easily so that you can follow up with the contacts on these quotes to make sure that you're not losing out on any business, etc.

So what we've got is these check boxes here on the left hand side. And there's this new button you'll notice down here called chase selected. And this will essentially open up a pop-up window that shows you a sort of email template that you can use to send to a number of different quotes that you've selected. So I've selected two here. So I'm going to chase these two quotes. So an email will go out to Dan and myself. The subject and the body we've pre-populated. So these come from settings that we've configured in the system. And these can be configured to whatever you like. So it's a bit of a time saving exercise to kind of template these as opposed to writing something out manually every single time. So in your system, this could be templated to be something that looks more like a email that you would send rather than something that we've written here. So this is just an example. We've got a great preview feature down here. So you can preview the email before you send it. So the subject being populated and the body. You'll notice that we're using something called tags here. So these are tags from the quote that are populated from data from the quote. And you can add these to the email body or the subject from the right hand side here. So you can overtype the subject or the body if you wish. Say, for example, I wanted to add the client's name in. I could double click here and the client's name would be added to the email body.

So that's quite helpful. And then what we can go ahead and do once we're happy with what we've previewed, we can send these emails out. And that's now successfully followed up to quotations for us. So if we head back to the list and refresh, You'll see the quotes have a follow-up date of today. A follow-up's been logged.

And you'll also notice over on the left-hand side here, the jotter, which some of you may already be using, has also now got a new indicator. So anywhere where the jotter is shown in the system, we now show a little count on the top right to tell you how many records have been written. So the jotter, if you're not already using the jotter, the jotter's a great way of making notes against quotes, projects, sites, invoices, whatever you deem appropriate. And you can see we've logged a note type of email and the subject of the email that was sent out has been logged. So you've got reference to know that that was sent out. And that's gonna be quite a good timesaver.

Dan

I think so, Jack. Definitely. It's, yeah, so useful. If you've got 10, 20, 30, even more quotes to follow up, you can just go and do it straight from the system.

The other point that's really good as well, Jack, is we colour code our follow-ups. So you can see the bottom record has got no follow ups and it's in red. Now at the top of the list, you can actually search by recent follow-ups. So you can search ones that are recently done or within 30 days or over 30 days. So that's a really good way of saying, right, I'm going to chase all of these red follow up ones. And then you can get those out. And then that'll obviously update the last date it was followed up. So it's a really quick way to-

Jack

Yeah, that'd be a really quick, quick and easy way to follow up multiple quotes all at once and just send out a large mail shot to lots of different people.

Dan

Absolutely. We've got one question come in. It's saying, can you have different email templates for the quote follow-up? So a different type if you could follow it up for the second or third time. At the moment we don't, that's quite a good idea actually.

Yeah, you could have a number of different templates to say, I'm doing quote follow-up number two, or quote follow-up number three. And that populates the subject and body with different ideas.

Jack

We could add a sort of drop down here at the top with some templates that you could select from, which would then populate the subject and body based on what was selected. So that's a good idea. So we'll definitely have a look at adding that into a upcoming release, probably release 42. Let's see if we can get that in.

That sounds like a great idea. Thank you very much. Great stuff. So the next feature that we just want to touch on is something that people have been waiting for for quite a while, I think, which is the auto emailing of asbestos survey reports. So as I'm sure all of you are aware at the moment, Alpha Tracker requires you to send the report manually to your customer as it stands. But we've built a feature now so that it can be sent automatically once you've kind of finished with the project or approved the work. So I'll just go into how that works. So on the client record, we have a new tab called settings. And this consists of lots of different settings, and this will probably grow over the next couple of releases. But there's a setting in here named auto email asbestos survey reports. So you enable it on your client record. So it's an opt in feature. So don't worry if you receive the update, the emails aren't going to start sending straight away, you have to opt in to say which of your customers you'd like to automatically send reports to, because not all customers may want this as something set up they might want you to send them manually still. So we've got that in there. Once that's ticked, and you've got a survey report in the folder. So here's one I created earlier. So I've produced a asbestos survey report for this project. And I want to go ahead and approve the work. So in the survey details, we've currently got the system configured to recognize the approved by as the criteria that's required to auto email. So say I approved this today, and hit save. Alpha Tracker will now recognize that as a project that is ready to be sent to the customer automatically. So Alpha Tracker will find the PDF in the folder for you. It will create an email, attach it and send it to the report recipient on the project. So if you just open up the project quickly,

Dan

Just while that's loading Jack, I thought it'd be worth mentioning, we've got our system set up so it sends from the approved by date, but you can set it up to be done in different ways we appreciate everyone works slightly differently so some people will approve the reports, as we've just done. Others might use the QC check features we've got built into Alpha Tracker, so we can trigger the emails to be sent in whichever way works for you basically. So yeah, we've just used the approved by in our instance but there are other ways to trigger these as well.

Jack

So as I mentioned, it goes out to the report recipient. So in this case, my email address is in the report recipients field. You can have multiple report recipients. I think it's up to five recipients you can have, and it will include all five.

And I'm just gonna show you the email that we got through. So again, this is just templated. It's not the email that you might want your customers to receive. So we've just set up something basic. So this could be a fully fledged, nicely styled email with sort of a signature on it, et cetera, et cetera, if you deem that appropriate. So if this is something that you want to use, let us know how you'd like it configured. And you can see that's come through just with the subject and please find attachments, best of survey reports for our setup. I can double click the PDF. And there's the asbestos survey report that we created earlier. So that works quite nicely. Will save quite a lot of time with people needing to go into the folders, download the reports, open up Outlook, send the email, et cetera. So hopefully that's onto a bit of a winner for you guys. So if you're interested in getting that set up, let us know, please do get in contact and we'll work with you to get that configured and hopefully save you a bunch of time.

Dan

Just a quick one on that, Jack. With the emails that are sent out, you know we have the placeholders in the quote follow-up stuff. Do we have the placeholders in those?

Jack

We do, yes. So it can say, hi, report recipient name as the tag, for example, so I might say hi, Dan or hi, Jack. And then, obviously, whatever else you've got in the body or the subject, we can pre-fill with information from the project. So that can be quite a nice looking email if you want to get to the effort of writing out quite a nicely styled sort of email, we can do that for you.

Dan

Oh, brilliant. That's good. That's really good. Fantastic.

Jack

Great stuff. So that kind of wraps up the... Oh, sorry. No, one moment. There is something I've missed. Once the email has been sent, as I mentioned earlier, the jotter shows the indicator. We do write a jotter record as well for the report being sent out. So you can see here we've got some note text to say the report has been sent to the customer, it says which file was sent. So you do have reference to that as well. And then that now does wrap up the feature for automatic sending of reports. Yeah, quite a nice feature.

The next feature that we want to move on to is something called the asbestos appointment screen that we've built, which I'll hand off to Dan to explain how that works.

Dan

Great stuff. Thanks Jack. So for those of you that have used the water hygiene module in Alpha Tracker, you might be familiar with the water appointment screen and essentially this is the asbestos version of it. So just as a quick overview, this is a really useful screen to see day to day what's been going on and how the appointments in your Alpha Tracker have progressed. So you can look at your surveying teams or you can look at individuals or groups of people on a particular day and see how their appointments have gone. So you can see here Jack's got the asbestos appointments open and he's filtered by today's date. So we've got three appointments booked in today.

I've got two, Jack's got one and it basically gives you an overview of how that appointment is, what state it's in and you can see on the right hand side we actually record the number of suspect, positive, negative and non-suspect items on a particular survey. So you can see at a glance, okay this survey's actually been actioned, there's been some items sent in, some data sent in and you can see a quick summary of that data there. You can also see if the report has been produced as well so you can see the second one down. We've got survey data in and it's been produced so that's really good and then it's also useful for tracking if surveyors weren't able to gain access to a property. For example, you can see that bottom one's got no access to site and this will help you reschedule appointments if you need to. It's also a good way to see if one of your surveys may need a hand. So if you have a look and one of your surveyors has got five appointments today and it's three o'clock and there's no data sent in you can get all we'll give them a call and just make sure they're okay and they can send in their data. It might be that they just don't have any phone signal and they're waiting to get home to send it but it's just a nice easy way to see how jobs have progressed on a particular day and even better as well as just being able to look at that we've got the option to be able to do additional filters to that information. So Jack's just showing you there where you can show all of the jobs that are incomplete or you haven't gained access to for example or you can see all of the jobs that don't have data in so these are probably the ones that you want to worry about if it's getting towards you end of your day and you haven't got the data for those. So it's a really nice overview screen and like I said the water hygiene module that's used really really frequently and this was a highly requested feature if you're following on from that one so if you're using water hygiene you'll be familiar with this if you're not check it out because I'm sure it'll make it a big difference.

Jack

Yeah it should be really helpful and you can kind of imagine using this as someone in the office just to check in say halfway through the day just to see how things are going, who's completed what job, what project. So yeah that should be quite a nice feature for the office staff for sure.

Dan

Yeah definitely. And it's got the Jotter feature in it as well.

Jack

And it's got the jotter of course. So you can see this one here, that was the one that we had the report sent out for earlier. So that's all tied in quite nicely and works quite well. So that's about it, I think, Dan.

Dan

I think so. I think that's coming on main three features.

Jack

So obviously, like I said earlier, Alpha Tracker Release 41 is out now. So if you've got, or if you need us to update your system, if you haven't got Release 41 yet, let us know, we'll get that updated for you. There's over 600 changes, 32 pages of release notes, and the stuff that we've just shown you there is just a couple of key features that we wanted to show you. But there's plenty more features in the release notes, so please do jump on the website, download the release notes when you get a chance, have a read through those, and if you see anything that you think you'd like to make use of in the release notes, then please do let us know and we'll be happy to get in contact with you and get those features up and running for you. And that brings us to a close, thanks for joining the Alpha Tracker webinar, and we'll see you on the next one.

Dan

Thanks very much.

Jack

Cheers, bye-bye.