Timely Product Roadmap – Here’s What’s Coming Soon!

1. Loyalty is now going to be Rewards

I know, I know, we’ve been talking about a Loyalty programme for ages and you’ve been requesting this as your #1 for a long time! We realise we talked about loyalty in our last roadmap blog and you’ve been waiting a while for this and for that we apologise.

Given Loyalty is consistently the #1 request from our customers we wanted to run some pretty thorough validation on how we could bring this to market for you. So we set out to interview a bunch of businesses around the world who provide loyalty services that we could potentially partner with. However, after further research and our own customer interviews, we realised that the best and most scalable option would be to build out a Loyalty programme ourselves. Not only that, we realised from the results of our customer survey and one-on-one customer interviews that we would instead shape Loyalty as Rewards.

Most of you have fairly high client retention rates so rather than thinking of Loyalty as a programme to encourage your clients to return, your feedback told us that a programme to reward your clients was the approach to take.

A Rewards programme is no different from your standard Loyalty programme. It’s more a way of thinking about how you can improve your client’s experience by thanking or ‘rewarding’ them for their loyalty.

So, the good news is that it’s currently in development! We expect you’ll have the first iteration of Rewards soon, which, based on your feedback, will be a points-based system. This will be the first step and there will be a number of iterations to constantly improve Rewards based off feedback loops with you!

2. Gain more control of your business!

We’ve got an exciting list of new features and feature improvements lined up for you to help business owners gain more control over their business.

Locking down access to locations

Just this month we released the ability for account holders to restrict staff access to certain locations when managing the calendar, sales, cash up register, stock, reports and more.

This is awesome for our larger customers who operate at multiple locations, but we’re also working on some exciting improvements to manage staff access for those of you with staff, no matter how many locations you have…

Gain visibility of your staff’s activity

We know that data security is important to your business, and having visibility over what is going on in your account helps you protect your business and your clients’ information.  Coming next week for customers on our Elevate and Innovate plans, is our brand new Activity log! Business owners will be able to check in on your staff’s activities in Timely – for example, when they may have edited an appointment or client, raised or edited a sale, viewed a certain report you may want them to monitor, made a stock order etc. There’s so much goodness in there and we’ll also be seeking feedback to get more ideas from you about how we can improve this in the future.

Greater security with more staff access options

We’re doing even more to help you gain more control and to tightly manage your business by giving you more options to restrict access to parts of Timely for your staff. For example, restricting the ability for staff to raise discounts or restricting the ability to delete stock.

Maximise your earnings with staff specific pricing

Increase your revenue and save yourself administrative headaches by charging your clients different prices for the same service depending on the level of experience your staff member has. For example, if your staff member is an apprentice you’ll soon be able to charge apprentice rates for a particular service. This will be available when clients are booking in person or online.

3. The shackles are coming off SMS campaigns

Last month we released targeted SMS campaigns, so you can now send relevant messages to a group of clients, filtered by appointment status, staff member, business location, the type of service, last appointment date, and whether your client is a VIP.

Thank you for all your feedback! The number one request was the ability to send longer SMS campaign messages. Great news! We’ve released this in New Zealand and will be releasing wider over the next month. You can choose to send your SMS in 2 or 3 parts, extending your limit to 459 characters.

You also asked us to be able to send SMS campaigns beyond the 3 months filter window, which we’re looking into. It’s a complicated piece of work but we’re determined to make it happen, so it’s likely to come later this year or early next year.

4. Maximise your staff’s time with multi-staff online bookings

Online booking for your clients just got a whole lot better with multi-staff booking. Clients will be able to book different services in the same appointment, such as a colour and a cut, laser hair removal and cosmetic injectables, or a brow shape and lash extensions – with different staff members who specialise in these services. Gone will be the days where your clients can only book with one staff member or not be able to book online at all because your staff member can ‘t do all the services your clients have selected.

5. Allow clients to manage and easily rebook appointments

Yes, it’s almost here! After a whole bunch of feedback, around October we’ll be releasing the ability to allow your clients to login when they make an online booking. The plan is to release client login to all, but if you don’t want this feature you’ll be able to easily opt-out. With client login enabled, your clients will be able to easily rebook a previous appointment and manage their future appointments, saving you the time you’d otherwise spend doing this for them. Following that, we’ll be looking into providing options for you to gain more control of who can rebook and when and how they can cancel.

6. Save heaps of time and take away the fuss with stock ordering

We’ve received some great feedback on how we can help you make stock ordering a breeze in Timely and can happily report that good news is on the way! We have a bunch of great improvements coming to help streamline your stock ordering and reduce the time spent creating large orders to send to your suppliers. Over the coming months, you will see a number of changes that will allow quicker creation of orders with an end goal of one-click stock ordering!

We want to hear from you

The way we build new features in Timely is based on your feedback. That means we sometimes only release a ‘minimal solution’ to the problem we’ve identified and then we improve it based on what you say is missing – we call this fast-follows. This means we can solve your problems faster and we know we are building things you love and use. To get in touch, either comment below or email us at [email protected].