Scout just launched our biggest update yet with the introduction of Arrival Windows. While arrival windows were frequently requested from the pet sitting community at large, we also made a lot of improvements to our existing features. Becoming a Scout customer is just the beginning of our relationship. The customer feedback is crucial to improving the user experience. Here are a few of the ways, big and small, that our community contributed to our latest update.
Approve Appointments
When James and I started Scout, one of the things we were most interested to see was how people would use the tools we built. Right away we noticed companies wanted to approve appointments, even if they weren't quite sure who the appointment would ultimately be assigned to. As a workaround, one of our customers had created a "To Be Determined" staff account. They were approving all the appointments to that account and then assigning the walks once they had their staff's schedule set. It turned out, they weren't the only ones doing this. While workarounds are ok, we really want to design features that all of our customers can easily use. Now, administrators can easily approve appointments as "Unassigned". To improve its usefulness, we also added a way to filter and flag these appointments to make them easier to track and less prone to oversights.
Tool Tips
Scout is a rapidly growing and diverse community. As larger companies started to implement Scout software and smaller companies began to grow more rapidly, the calendar becomes a bit challenging to work with. There's only so much space on your screen. As you add more and more appointments and staff, it starts to become a bit tricky to read the appointment details. This is where customer feedback really helped. To combat this issue, we added new tooltips to the schedule. Now managers can just hover over the appointment to see the details without opening the appointment editor.
Select All Staff in Calendar
Staff view is one of the most important features in Scout. It's where our user spends most of their time. One of the things admins like the most is the way we filter multiple staff into columns. This view allows an admin to see the entire schedule at a glance, quickly move appointments and maximize resources. The only issue, you had to load staff one at a time. It seems like a small thing, but when you have 15 pet sitters the time adds up. Developing a system that makes businesses more efficient isn't only about building big features, it's small adjustments that add up to big savings.