Here we are, once again in the season of men with long white
beards wearing strange red gowns, saying those oddly provocative
words "Ho Ho Ho!" and creating an unhealthy worry about
the whereabouts of mistletoe!
But onto jolly things! Firstly we would very much like to welcome Nicola to our team to work alongside Helen and Emma on all aspects of client services. Nicola comes directly from university with a degree in European Business Administration which we hope will add to the depth and breadth of the R.E.D. knowledge-base. It’s always surprising just how many facets there are to publishing and how many different things one needs to know about!
As usual, R.E.D. will be closed for all but emergency faxes between Christmas Eve and the New Year. If you have anything urgent, do fax it because although we won’t be answering the phone, we will be popping in and out to work on specific projects, and we can ring you.
Helen and John are taking a well-deserved break over Christmas
to visit family in far-distant lands, and they will be away from
18 December until the New Year. In fact we understand they will
be celebrating the start of 1999 at 35,000 feet!
All of us at R.E.D were invited to join in two days of Customer Services training organised at the offices of one of our clients, which we thought was a splendid idea. By the time you read this we will have completed our training and should be full of useful ideas to improve our own customer services.
The latest User Group meeting was held at the offices of IDS (thank you IDS for making your offices available to us) just off Old Street and we would particularly like to thank Christine and her team for their stupendous efforts in the tea and coffee tasks! Once again, about 40 people came, although what is nice is that it is not always the same people who can make it on the day, so we get to see lots of different faces!
We had some excellent short talks sharing the real-life experience of some of our users; - how to prepare for an ABC audit, electronic data exchange of agent renewals, life-time value of subscribers and marketing techniques and ideas. These were all particularly interesting and I’m sure that everybody there will want us to thank the speakers for their preparation and generosity of spirit.
These were followed by a brief chat from Helen regarding some of the new, more general-interest, program developments - what they do - how they can be used and what’s in the pipelines. Then there were the special interest group gatherings. Over the various Meetings, it’s a joy for us to see these developing into real interchanges of ideas and mutual help, both social and professional.
A few people spotted that there was a demonstration computer
running the new Windows interface of the circulations program,
and went to have a fiddle. We think they quite liked it!
The R.E.D. open day last month was very jolly and we really
enjoyed the opportunity to chat with those who came in a gentle,
relaxed and un-rushed environment. Information on all sorts of
subjects could be exchanged in a way which simply couldn’t
have happened over the phone or by letter, made smoother still
by the odd glass of wine or two! I think everybody enjoyed it.
Those who were here in the evening were especially lucky because
they got to sample the most fantastic Thai food prepared by JB’s
wife Valee and their friend Toy. John’s office was turned
into the most unusual kitchen anybody has ever seen!
On the subject of new things, here are some of the other things we’ve been up to since the September letter:
Batch Credit Card Processing.
Those of you who receive payments by credit card will be pleased to hear that there is now a module for the batch processing of credit cards overnight which we hope will save the fandango of using a PDQ machine for every payment, and wear and tear on the fingers! Similar to the BACS module, it needs some third party software which interfaces with the card companies and banks, and will return a report of any anomalies. We’re very pleased with this module, and think it’ll save huge amounts of time and frustration, so if you would like information, please let us know.
Post Code Updates
You know how some people’s postcodes are suddenly and almost inexplicably changed by the Post Office to a completely different postcode, or a village suddenly moves itself from one town to another town?? Yes - sounds familiar? The PO can provide - at a minimal cost - these changes on disks, imaginatively called "Post Code Updates", and we now have a rather splendid facility to pass these changes through your data, find addresses matching the old information and change them to the new automatically as appropriate. Wonderful!
Manuals available on Disk
The R.E.D. Subscription, Mailorder, and Reader Enquiry manuals have now been converted to Word documents which we can make available on disk, in Word 6, Word 97, or HTML format. If you would like one, please say so!
Addition to Media Menu
We have recently installed a Jazz drive, so we can add Jazz cartridges to the list of media for easy data exchange.
R.E.D. Intranet
We are making progress on preparing things for our Web site, and have now set up our first few pages on an internal Intranet. In the long term this is for internal support, but it also gives us the feel and experience of setting up web pages with links and the like. We think it’s going to be fun, but a lot of work!
If you use BACS remember that they will only be processing
on certain days over the Christmas break. BACS should have sent
you a list of the relevant dates, but we have a copy if you need
one
May we wish everybody a very happy and peaceful Christmas and a prosperous, fulfilling 1999.