Home » Case Study »

Admin System and E-Mails

The Admin System

It's often noted that only 10% of an iceberg is visible above the water.  A similar concept applies to most web applications: only a small part is visible to viewers while a great deal of effort is expended behind-the-scenes in the Admin System.

Levels of Admin Access

SportSessionPlanner supports four levels of Admin, which provide an appropriate level of security for different tasks:

Sales Admin

Tools for the in-house sales force to create and service customer accounts.  Customer Account Managers need:

  • Access to the Sales Database, which manages communications between customers/prospects and the SSP organisation
  • Product and pricing information, in different countries and currency zones
  • Tools to pre-create customer accounts, set account options, work within a discount policy, generate invoices, manage invoices, receive notification of accounts with an approaching renewal
  • To resolve support requests, with access to logs, viewing an account from the point of view of any given customer, set notices on customer accounts, view and re-send e-mails when required
  • To manage Club and Coach Accounts, including inter-Club coach transfers, configuring additional user features and libraries, setting-up squads, teams and players when requested by Clubs
  • To view their sales figures and commission due.

Reseller Admin

A reduced level of access for external sales partners, which still gives appropriate facilities to:

  • Set-up Customer Accounts
  • Manage their own customer accounts and provide them with support, without access to any data outside of their own customers
  • Access their sales and click-through sales figures, and commission due.

Super Admin

Almost complete access to Admin Functions.  For SportSessionPlanner management team to:

  • Manage finances: Set prices, currencies, and country zones, set discount policies, view real-time Gross Profit and Cash Receipts reports
  • Manage other Admin roles: supervise other Admin users, amend invoices, manage referers.

Designer Admin

Allows web designers to add and test customisations for particular Clubs who request the look-and-feel of their own website be extended to SportSessionPlanner.

Developer Admin

Access allowing Developers to complete business requests which require programming considerations, do not yet happen regularly enough to justify the cost of a polished system, or are in a queue for development time.  In SportSessionPlanner, this includes:

  • Carrying-out upgrade tasks
  • Dealing with bounced e-mails
  • Placing system notices
  • Defining roles and permissions.

E-Mails

Almost all web applications send lots of e-mails.  Here are some examples from SportSessionPlanner:

  • Non-subscribers: invitations from other users and from sales team
  • Subscribers: invoices and receipts, pre-created account activations, renewals management, exipries and Club account withdrawals, newsletters, forgotten passwords
  • Club Managers: Trial daily and end-of-trial e-mails, club coach e-mail bounce advice
  • Sales Team: Clubs up for renewal, Club usage stats
  • Developers: webite health alerts.

E-mail design and processes need to be carefully considered (especially e-mails triggered by subscribers to other people) to keep recipients spam-free.  Black-listing is catastrophic for a web application, and can result from user complaints and multiple e-mail failures.

High-power E-Mails

E-mails can be an automated Customer Account Manager.  Here's one such example from SportSessionPlanner.

If a Club is given a 7-day trial, that's a critical period for getting maximum benefit from the software: a week for the Club Manager to see it as an indespensible tool.  Every day during the trial, SportSessionPlanner analyses the Club's use of the Software, and sends an e-mail to the User with relevant advice:

  • Time left in trial (and opportunity to buy now, of course)
  • Coaches available, allocated, still to activate their accounts, and how many training sessions they have each created
  • Links to the training sessions created within the last 24 hours
  • Advice about facilities not yet tried, and hyperlinks to them.