What is Customer Retention?

Customer Retention is the ability of an organization or business to retain customers by providing them good services, managing the quality of the products sold and quickly satisfy customer issues.

Company revenue increases by bringing new customers, but it is even more critical to preserve the existing customers. It often costs much more to acquire a new customer than to keep them.

Benefits of Customer Retention

1. Creating a good relationship with customers is cheaper than spending time and money on marketing.

2. Loyal customers create word-of-mouth referrals personally or via social networks.

3. Happy customers are more likely to buy more products from your company. It is easier to upsell them compared to approaching a new company with whom you do not have a relationship with.

Tools that can Improve Customer Retention

1. A Contact Manager or CRM can help keep track of all your customers and separate them from your other leads. It can also track the communication between you and your customers via direct messages or social networks.

2. A Campaign or newsletter creation software can automate sending periodic information to your customers. It helps to keep in touch with your customers periodically by sending them important news or advancements in your area of expertise.

3. A tool to track customer issues and their resolution can also be immensely helpful in answering customer queries on time. You can also create in-house metrics to find out how your service professionals are supporting your customers.

4. A survey software to get periodic customer feedback.

Photo Courtesy: David Seibold Creative Common Attribution

Welcome to our first major release of 2019. This release provides you with new enhancements and lots of fixes. 

See the complete Release Notes

Upload and Download Folders

In addition to files, you can now upload and download folders in the Document Management application.

Introducing Drop Site

 Imagine you want a simple way for your customers to upload documents to your OfficeClip. They click on a link and can upload documents for you. 

Settings Screen Enhancements

Few of our users complained that our settings feature is spread out across various screens and it gets difficult to navigate through many functions. We have now consolidated everything in one place so that administrators and users alike can navigate better.

Reject Comments in Time Off

Comments can now be entered when a time Off requested is rejected by the approver.

More Skins

The skin selection screen has become better with the introduction of three new skins and a better UI.

In addition to these enhancements, we have fixed many issues. For a complete release notes click here.

Over the years we have seen Google shelves products that creates good following but does not make enough money for them. I liked Google Reader, Google Talk and when Google shelved Notebook and wanted people to switch to Keep, I instead opted for another product.

Today Google announced that they are shelving the consumer version of Google+ because of compromised private profiles of many users. Also they reasoned that people do not spend enough time on average accessing it. Less time also means less ad revenue for Google. Instead of fixing the security issues they opted for closing the product altogether.  

Many other big developers like Microsoft keeps products for a long time even after they stopped development on it and then merge them to more popular products, like Hotmail to Live and MSN to Bing. 

This practice of google will make consumers more suspicious to adopt new products from them for the pain of leaving them when they started liking and getting used to them.

We made many user interface changes in this release and also added some new features.

Changes to the OfficeClip UI and Skins

The entire OfficeClip UI has been modified to make it more usable and modern. All the icon images have been replaced by the font icons. Spacing has been increased between various UI elements. In addition, the OfficeClip interface has been made responsive. This means that it can be used in the modern mobile devices as is.

In addition, a total of 18 different skins has been modified to change the theme associated with those skins. Some of the skins (e,g, Metro Touch) has been optimized to make it work better on touch devices.

In/Out Timesheet

Many of you had requested us to include the ability to add employee check-in and check-out times in the timesheet. In this release, users will be able to add in, out and break times for each day.

In addition to this, these times can be seen in the timesheet preview and in the reports.

Mobile Design Changes

OfficeClip Mobile interfaces for iOS and Android has also gone through many design changes. Google Material Design has been adopted in all the screens. We have also extended the features of the application by adding more screens.

Companies offer paid time leave to employees as part of their benefit. Most of these vacations are given as a credit of time worked. For example, a company can give an employee 12 hours of sick time every month. If the employee does not get sick on a particular month, the leave may get accrued into an account that can be used later. There are various possibilities:

1. Employees accrue PTO that can be cashed out at the end of the year (if not used).

2. Only a certain number of PTOs can be transferred to the next year.

3. If PTO is accrued at the beginning of the month or end of the month. If the employee joins in the middle of the month, it could be prorated.

PTO Accrual Scenarios:

1. John joined the company on Jan 15, 2018, and is allocated 1.5 days of sick leave every month that expires at the end of the year.

If we assume the following:

1. John has not claimed any sick leave so far

2. Leave is accrued at the beginning of every month

3. It is prorated

On July 1, 2018, John will have 0.75 days of leave accrued for January and 1.5 days of leave from February to July totaling 9.75 days (78 hours).

2. Mary gets vacation leave of 2 days every month and only 10 days of such leave can be rolled over to the next year. If we assume that:

1. Mary already had 5 days of vacation rolled over from last year

2. Leave is accrued at the end of the month

3. Mary has already taken 3 days of vacation in this year

On July 1, 2018, Mary will have 5 days from the last year, 2 days for every month from January to June and 3 days subtracted totaling 14 days of vacation accrued.

OfficeClip Time-Off application is available as a hosted (cloud) or a self-installed solution (that can be installed in your private cloud like Amazon AWS). To try out visit the OfficeClip Timesheet product page.

We have a brand new release for you. Here are some of the highlights:

Enhancements:

1. Free OfficeClip for unlimited users and unlimited time
2. SMS using Twilio
3. Expense Templates using Liquid API
4. DCAA password verification

Free OfficeClip

Starting this release we made OfficeClip standard edition free for unlimited users for unlimited time. A list of features and version comparison is available at this web page.

SMS using Twilio

All notifications and messages can now be sent directly to mobile devices via SMS. OfficeClip supports two types of SMS:

1. Email SMS: Use this option when you want to send SMS free of cost using the SMS email address. Most SMS providers provide an email address that can be used to send SMS to a mobile phone. A list some if the SMS providers are given here.
2. Twilio SMS: Twilio is an SMS provider that allows SMS to be sent through their network inexpensively. To use this option you will have to create an account in twilio.com and use the account id and password in OfficeClip.
   

   
   SMS in the Professional and Enterprise Edition of OfficeClip.
   
   

Expense Templates using Liquid API

In this release, we have added liquid templates to the expenses. This will allow administrators to customize the printed expense report for the organization.

The template is designed using the powerful liquid template language.

This feature is only available in the Enterprise Edition of OfficeClip.

DCAA password verification

Many of our customers who are doing government projects, requested that we provide a mechanism to sign the timesheet electronically before being submitted. In this release, we have provided a way to enable this feature in the Profiles menu of Timesheet administration.

This feature is only available in the Enterprise Edition of OfficeClip.

Complete Release Notes

If you have installed OfficeClip on your local server and want to access it from outside your LAN you have the following options:

1. Setup port forwarding on your router to the OfficeClip Server IP address
2. Use the router supported dynamic DNS to automatically forward incoming OfficeClip request the OfficeClip server
3. Use third-party reverse IP services like ngrok to access OfficeClip without doing any change in your router

When you are working on a project inside OfficeClip, and you need to share a document or a folder with your customers you can do it directly from within the OfficeClip Sharing Application.

You can share the documents in two ways:

1. Web Link: In this mode, the system generates an email that contains a link. On clicking, it provides a way to download the document to the user's computer. This form of sharing can be password protected, and you can also put an expiration date.
   
   The password is usually not sent in the same email as the link.
   
   
2. Secured Link: In this mode, you first create a login account for your customer. Then you share the document in the same manner as in public sharing, but the customer will have to log in to his/her portal account to see the share.
   
   

We are starting to work on our next release. I have created a roadmap of what will be included in it. Please feel free to vote and add comments on the features you would like to see implemented next.

>> OfficeClip Roadmap

OfficeClip has released a new Sage 50 AddIn that works with the 2018 edition of the software. It can be downloaded from the OfficeClip website.

OfficeClip has also released a new patch that fixes the following items:

1. Documents: When downloading documents, the correct revision was not getting downloaded
2. Campaigns: In Design Mode, sometimes the images from the external sites were triggering exception
3. Timesheet: With custom fields, the column totals were not lining up
4. Time Off: Time Offs showing for people who were not in the Approval Route

This release brings to you more enhancements and bug fixes.

Timesheet Preview Template

The timesheet preview screen shows the entire timesheet on one screen. It is used by some of our customers to keep a paper trail of all the OfficeClip Timesheets.

Many organization likes to format the timesheet the way they were already used to. We have provided a template language so that customers can format the timesheet to their own likes and print them. See a short video below.

Timesheet Custom Fields

You can now add custom fields to the Timesheet. The custom fields can be of type text or list with fixed values. They will appear on each row in the new or edit timesheet screen. The custom fields will appear in the reports and in exports. Currently there is a limit of three custom fields in the timesheet.

To set custom fields go to Timesheet > Admin > Custom Fields

Bug Fixes

We made a lot of fixes in this release too. Here is a list:

1.  Calendar: Calendar > List > Agenda - Unable to view the screen of Agenda   NK1822 (10.x)
2. Calendar: Desktop > Calendar > Import/Export > Google Sync > Tab changes to shared calendar   NK1783 (10.x)
3. Calendar: Calendar > Import/Export > Export calendar events - Open csv, then try to export. The Tab changes to Shared Calendar   NK1824 (10.x)
4. Contacts: After creating a user, it is not creating the password automatically   DK1813 (10.x)
5. Expenses: Expense Detail Missing in Reports   MI1246 (Support tickets)
6. Extranet: Extranet Admin > Insert image is not working   BK1842 (10.x)
7. Invoices: Invoices > Filter - While searching for invoices with Due balance it is showing the quotes and estimates also   DK1820 (10.x)
8. Issue Tracker: Binder name was not showing in the email triggered by rule   RS1250 (10.x)
9. Notes: Desktop > Notebook > Note > Private note is accessible to other users through history   SY1789 (10.x)
10. Notes: Some information is showing up via history that is not supposed to be shown   SD1793 (10.x)
11. Rest-Api: Rest API > Non Admin Tasks - Don't have permission 'Read' at Access Default in Org Settings - Sill able to see all the tasks   NK1806 (10.x)
12. Time Off: Unable to see Time Off approve screen in some situations   SD1846 (10.x)
13. Time Off: HRM > TImeOff > unknown timeoffs added to all Employees   SY1819 (10.x)
14. Timesheet: HRM > Timesheet > When an Admin approved the timesheet with Bulk Approve option, it was not showing in the timesheet history   SG1839 (10.x)

We have just released a new version of OfficeClip 10.5.1.

We made many enhancements and hundreds of bug fixes. Most important enhancements we are releasing are:

1. An Email Tracker that queues and tracks all emails that goes out of OfficeClip
2. In addition to the SOAP API, we have added a REST API module

The video below shows how you can create a contact web-form to capture leads from your website. It also discusses basic customization of the web form to make the look and feel of the form similar to your website.

Today we have released a new patch that solves some of our customer's issues. Following are the changes in this patch:

1. Patch: General: Google Sync was failing in some cases   PE1141 (Support Tickets)
2. Patch: Timesheet: Could see attachments inside Submitted/Approved Timesheet   AC1138 (Support Tickets)
3. Patch: Contacts: Mandatory List Fields were not checked for validation   AC1137 (Support Tickets)
4. Patch: Projects: Unable to scroll the Accounts List screen   AC1136 (Support Tickets)

Today we released a patch for 10.4.27. If fixes one issue:

• Projects > Accounts List - Screen cannot be scrolled down

I got a few questions from some of our customers on proper use of the OfficeClip Time Off and Accruals. OfficeClip Time Off application has many features that can manage your employee's vacation, leaves and paid time off. I decided to create a tutorial video to make it simple. Let me know if you liked it or have any questions.

We are pleased to announce a new release this year for OfficeClip. The following are some of the important changes we made to the product:

1. Timesheet - Time Off Integration
2. Live Chat Integration
3. Lots of bug fixes

We have made a service release 10.4.22. This fixes some of the recently reported issues.

1. Enhancement: Notes: In the issue tracker text areas hyperlink buttons are there try to add a hyperlink and unlink observe the functionality working or not and check the spell check button is before the hyperlink
2. Bug Fix: Issue Tracker: Note was not formatted correctly for extranet users
3. Bug Fix: Settings: Deleting an organization with some demo data was throwing an exception NR1538(10x)
4. Bug Fix: Time Off: Time Off → Admin → Select a time off category → History → was showing the wrong history KP1094(Support Tickets)
5. Bug Fix: Time Off: Time Off rejection mails are not coming to the user BK1544(10x)
6. Bug Fix: Time Off: Timeoff > my requests & archived lists > delete was not asking for permisssion DK1531(10x)
7. Bug Fix: Timesheet: Timesheet Profile change email was not sending emails correctly (the link was showing up as empty) IK1543(10x)
8. Bug Fix: Timesheet: User was not able to navigate to the timesheet page from the email link that is sent when the timesheet is approved NK1525(10x)