Inphonite will be speaking at two AzMGMA monthly meetings in Tucson in August.  Please watch this space for dates and times.

My thoughts at present are to discuss Inbound Marketing and Social Marketing.  This would include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well as sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.

Please let me know if this is of interest to you.  If you have another topic that you would prefer, I would appreciate that feedback as well.

Thanks.

We announced this week that ReminderPro and LabRetriever perform the equivalent work of 1-2 full time employees at Del Mar Family Practice, a three physician practice in San Diego, CA.

There is a benefit to Del Mar Family Practice that was not mentioned in the press release.  In addition to sending appointment reminders, ReminderPro is integrated with LabRetriever.  As a result, ReminderPro automatically calls those patients with updated lab results in LabRetriever.  The patient can press a button, transfer to LabRetriever, enter a secure PIN, and retrieve the lab results directly over the telephone. 

Of course the patient always has the option of retrieving his or her lab results at a later time if it is more convenient.  In either case, the patient has been notified soon after the lab results are available.

Do you use a Remote Desktop Connection to access the ReminderPro computer? A number of our users do. The process is normally to launch the Remote Desktop Connection from the Start menu, but did you know that you can create a shortcut on your desktop to automatically launch a direct connection to that computer? No need to dig through the Start menu to find the icon, or type in the name or IP address of the computer. Creating a shortcut like this is a quick and convenient way to access the ReminderPro computer.

What you do is right click on your desktop, and go to New > Shortcut. In the Type the location of the item field, type something like:

%SystemRoot%\system32\mstsc.exe /v: computer_name_or_ip

Or, for example:

%SystemRoot%\system32\mstsc.exe /v: rpws-1

When you complete the wizard and save the shortcut, you can double click it and launch the remote connection. The next window that appears should be the login prompt for that computer. Handy, huh?

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InphoniteShoutOUT is a free voice notification service powered by InphoniteVoice, our outbound telephony SaaS. To use InphoniteShoutOUT simply go to shoutout.inphonite.com. All you need to use the service is a valid email address, the text of the message you want to send, and the phone numbers you want to send the message too. You can send a ShoutOUT to up to 25 phone numbers at a time. The only limits are that you can only send 1 ShoutOUT per email address per day and that any 1 particular number can only receive 1 ShoutOUT per day (this is to ensure nobody cheats and tries to annoy someone.) As I mentioned this service is completely FREE. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

I recently took the hour drive from Tucson to Benson, Arizona to enjoy my second visit to Kartchner Caverns. This trip was a lesson in providing superior customer service.

(Full Disclosure: I am acquainted with a grandson of the Kartchners as well as several members of their extended family.)

The caves are still “living” in the sense that calcite formations continue to form and grow. You may even be lightly struck by a “cave kiss”, a drop of mineral-rich water, during your visit. Also, the caves are a summer home to a colony of bats.

The Park came to be because of the cooperation among the original discoverers of the caves, the Kartchner family, and the State of Arizona. Here is a link to the park’s history. As a result of vision and this cooperation, the delicate ecosystem of Kartchner Caverns is preserved, while simultaneously, thousands of visitors are able to enjoy this geological wonder each year.

Here are just a few examples of superior customer service at Kartchner Caverns:

• It is easy to purchase tickets for a given tour, either online or via telephone.
• You are encouraged to arrive one hour before your tour start time. (This is so that people like me who arrive “late” (less than 60 minutes before tour time) can still make their tour.)
• The front desk is well staffed with friendly people ready to assist you.
• There is a video presentation before the start of your tour. (This is also so that people like me who arrive “late” can still make their tour. Hint: You can see the video presentation AFTER the tour if necessary.)
• The rules you must follow are carefully explained.
• Both tours are 100% wheelchair accessible (This is quite an engineering feat.)
• The tour guides clearly enjoy what they do.

Another example of superior customer service is found at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. Where else can you find a world-renowned zoo/natural history museum/botanical garden open 365 days a year that dispenses free sunscreen (SPF 30)?

The key to providing superior customer service is in knowing your customer’s needs better than your customer knows them.

Inphonite is sponsoring two AzMGMA events in Tucson.  Please stop by and introduce yourself.

May 12, 2009      12:00am
Arizona Inn, 2200 E. Elm Street, Tucson, AZ 85719

Tucson Central Monthly Meeting
“Red Flag” Overview
Carl Shultz and Diana Knight, Card Solutions, Inc.
http://www.azmgma.org/events_detail.cfm?pk_event=122

May 19, 2009      7:30am
Amber Lights Retirement Community, 6231 N Montebella Rd, Tucson, AZ 85704

Tucson North/Northwest Monthly Meeting
“Better Manage Your Retirement Plan with Education & Fiduciary Compliance”
Beth Bank, an advisor with the Stuchen / Levy Group of Merrill Lynch http://www.azmgma.org/events_detail.cfm?pk_event=123

You can register for each event from the links above.  For non-AzMGMA members the cost is $35.

The original idea behind InphoniteVoice was to be a simple subscription model. For example, a person would sign up for a subscription that would have a monthly fee of N dollars a month. That would give the subscriber some number of messages they could send per month. Seems simple enough - but what would happen if the subscriber exceeded their monthly allotment of messages? Alright, then we will just charge a small overage fee per message after they used up their allotment. Not too bad so far but then we added the capability to transfer calls. Now calls could easily become very long and we're paying long distance for two outbound legs. So then we added the concept of minutes for calls that lasted more then 3 minutes would cost an additional 4.9 cents/minute. So what started as an ultimately simple idea got really complicated really fast. A monthly bill would need to be broken out into bucket messages, additional messages, and extra minutes. The system would change 5 different monthly subscription rates with different bucket messages for each level. Each level also had different overage costs. Wow, it got complicated.

The new model is significantly more simple - credits. One credit equals 1 message - delivered. If a message exceeds 3 minutes in length an additional credit will be used. The credits never expire. Credits get cheaper as you buy more of them at once. You don't get charged for credits you don't use, as is the case with the subscription model. Why are credits 3 minutes? Why not change less per credit and then lower a credit to 1 minute? A credit includes the overhead of contacting a person. For example, in InphoniteVoice, if you created a rule that tries multiple numbers and if that person is not contacted until the 3rd number that's still only 1 credit. The 3 minute "clock" does not start until you reached your intended recipient. Our estimates is that you will be able to deliver nearly all of your notifications using a single credit per individual reached. The only time you may need to use multiple credits is when you are utilizing transfer functionality.

There are a few more advantages to using credits. It is now fairly easy to add coupons. In fact - here's a free coupon for you to try: FREE100. The first 50 to use the coupon will get 100 free additional credits. Also, every account has the ability to refer other people. If you refer someone then every time they buy credits you will get 10% of their purchase automatically credited to your account as credits.

The new model is now live so go ahead and give it a try. Don't forget to use your coupon!

Ever thought about what you can do to keep your computer running well? I'm sure we all have, and pretty often. There are a few things you can do regularly to make sure that the computer you run ReminderPro on is as healthy as can be. Here are my ideas:

Restart the computer often. While a computer is running programs, information gets stuffed away in memory. This is information that the computer needs temporarily to do its thing, and the space taken by this stuff is usually made available after the job is done. Nonetheless, programs like ReminderPro can stuff away quite a bit of this information. To clear this stuff out, we recommend that you restart the computer weekly, at least.

Defragment the hard drive. I won't go into all the technical stuff required to fully explain this, but let me just say that defragmenting your computer's hard drive can make a big difference in how the computer runs. It could be faster and more reliable if you defragment regularly, perhaps monthly. Certainly, it'll help avoid problems with ReminderPro. That said, you would defragment your hard drive by going to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and clicking on Disk Defragmentor.

Clear out temporary files. Personally, I've found that some frustrating things can happen if there is a "bad" temporary file on your computer. This can happen if a program you're working in locks up, or if a power surge restarts your computer for you. So if you have a situation when using your computer, you might wish to restart and then delete temporary files, just to try to keep things running smoothly. (Frankly, its a good practice to do this monthly, anyway.) Now, there are a few ways to delete temporary files, but the easiest is to go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and click Disk Cleanup. You would run it against your C: drive (it'll prompt you). After it has scanned your computer, it will pop up a list of things you can "cleanup". The only one that needs to be checked off is Temporary Files. That said, it is a good idea to empty the Recycle Bin occasionally, and maybe do other things from time to time — especially if you need more room on your hard drive. But that is optional for our purposes here, so I'll leave that up to you.

Are there other things you do to keep your computer running? Please share them here.

Save the date.  The MGMA 2009 Exhibit Hall will be open October 11 - 13.

Be sure to stop by to see a demonstration of our newest hosted IVR solution - InphoniteVoice.

MGMA 2009 Annual Conference
Colorado Convention Center
Denver, CO
October 11–13, 2009
Booth: 1832

See you there!