Constant improvement

Our product team has been hard at work building and improving features that make it easy for businesses to maintain quality communication with their customers.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest changes and improvements in our latest product release. Bear with us, as it’s a long one, but there is a lot of really helpful information in it.

Dashboard updates

The dashboard can be the anchor of the CityGro portal. Here you’ll track the performance of your customer retention efforts, notice trends and gather information to make informed decisions.

To do this, it needs to offer you clear, actionable insights. It needs to present the right data, in the right way, to make this learning intuitive for business owners of any kind.

Over the past six months, we’ve given the Dashboard a large portion of our attention — listening to and implementing customer feedback in every section.

This release contains many improvements, but here are a few that stand out:

Conversions

You may notice the addition of an extra data point in your dashboard — Conversions. 

Conversions provide a clear way to tie your retention and activation efforts to the results that they drive.

A Conversion is tallied when a customer receives a message and checks in or redeems a SmartOffer within seven days.

Let’s imagine you sent an SMS blast to your customers, letting them know of a promotion you had going that day. Any customers that received that blast and came into your business within seven days (dependent on a check-in at a kiosk or redemption of a SmartOffer) would be considered a Conversion.

You’ll see Conversions on the Overview tab of the Dashboard, front and center.

Compare View chart

With so many elements going on inside your business, it can be hard to track trends.

In this latest update, we provide a way to display up to four data points in a comparative line graph, allowing you to see potential trends between efforts and results.

Did an email blast drive more check-ins? Was your SMS blast effective in gathering new contacts? We hope this change allows you to feel more confident in your efforts, knowing what you can do to drive customer growth.

Show “day of week” on chart hover

This was a bit of really great advice offered from a customer. In any of our charts, we were not displaying the day of week when hovering over a particular date — information that might be very helpful to a business owner trying to track activity on certain days of the week.

When hovering over a certain date, you’ll now see day of week, month and date — as well as the specific data involved.

Campaigns are now Blasts

In an effort to streamline the process for our users to send quick, one-off messages to their customer base, we’ve made some changes.

Where you’re used to seeing “Campaigns”  in the lefthand tools section of the CityGro portal, you’ll now see “Blasts.”

Blast: A one-time message sent manually to a selected group of contacts. Blasts are not triggered by any action, nor are they recurring. You build it, choose who to send it to, and send it right now or schedule it to go out at a certain time.

If you’ve previously come to Campaigns to set up “recurring” and “triggered” automated messages, have no fear. While this functionality is no longer created, configured or seen in the Blasts tool, it is still very much available and encouraged in the CityGro portal.

You’ll now find automated and triggered messages within the Automations tool. This robust tool holds some of the most effective magic of the CityGro platform. 

A note on Automations:

Many of you have begun to use Automations for other purposes, like multi-day recapture campaigns, for example.

If you’re new to Automations, feel free to reach out to our Customer Success Team for a quick tutorial. Once you get the hang of the tool, the possibilities are literally endless.

OR

[Slightly] changed Blast process

Those of you that have become used to sending one-time messages (now referred to as “Blasts”) in the CityGro portal may notice some changes to the send process.

In line with our efforts to make it more simple to perform the tasks you do most often, you’ll mostly notice adjustments in:

• The steps: We’ve reordered some of the steps to ask the right questions at the right time.
• Templates: Content can be the hardest part of sending a message. By pre-populating 10+ message templates in every account, and giving them a more prominent role in the Blast process, we hopefully make it easier to get a message out —and your customers in — the door.
• Filter transparency: While incredibly useful and robust, contact filters can be tricky to master and finicky to get right. By surfacing some of the background logic in the Blast filter step, users will hopefully start to see how filters can help you direct messages to the right contacts.
• Offers: Messages send with offers perform better. It’s now easier to create or add offers (now called SmartOffers) within a Blast message.

Offers are now “SmartOffers”

Business owners have long drummed up offers to activate customers, providing a well-timed and well-tailored nudge to [hopefully] prompt a customer to pay a visit or prompt a purchase that they may not have otherwise done. These common offers exist on posters and handouts, via word-of-mouth, on social media and any other number of places.

Add a SmartOffer in Step 1 of the Blast process.

When combined with the advanced technology and segmentation developed by CityGro, the common offer can become something even more powerful. By changing the name of our Offers tool to SmartOffers, we demonstrate the potential power and intelligence that exists at the fingertips of CityGro users.

A SmartOffer makes an offer:

• Targeted
• Measurable
• Trackable

When sending out a Blast, you’ll now be asked “Will your message include a SmartOffer?”. Create one from scratch or include one that’s already been created.

Visits are now “Check-Ins”

This isn’t so much a change as it is clarifying an inconsistency. We’ve used both somewhat interchangeably across the CityGro portal.

In many ways these terms are the same. In some pretty important ones, they’re not.

A “check-in” is generally seen as the best way for the CityGro system to know that a customer has been in the store. Often, there is a loyalty event or other promotion tied to this to incentivize customers to head to the CityGro kiosk and check in.

The benefit to the business is obvious — increased loyalty, sales and transparency into the customer base.

Here’s where it gets tricky. We could say that all check-ins are visits, but all visits are not check-ins.

In a perfect world, everyone that visited your business would check in. That would give us 100% visibility into our customers’ habits and patterns, which would all0w us to serve them better.

This isn’t the real world, however, and we know that not everyone that visits checks in. These show up in your POS system as anonymous transactions, and you don’t know how often they come in or what prompted them to come in today.

Successful CityGro businesses know that more check-ins mean more intelligence and greater confidence when making marketing and customer satisfaction decisions.

In short, do your best to turn every visit into a check-in. Do this and you’ll see check-ins — and revenue — go up.

One place you’ll see check-ins is along the bottom of a contact’s record.

Inbox message tabs

Many of you use the Inbox tool to communicate with customers. Using this tool, you can field inbound questions, resolve customer issues and get a feel for what your customers are saying.

Patterning most email services, and to cut out the clutter of archived messages, we created tabs to toggle between Inbox and All messages. Bounce between the two as needed.

Other miscellaneous improvements

• Bug fixes
• System enhancements
• User experience adjustments

While three bullet points cannot sufficiently demonstrate it, our team is constantly working to improve the speed, dependability and security of our platform.

Work is regularly being done to make CityGro a more effective tool in your hands.

We’re excited to be doing it with you.

-CityGro Product Team