A warm welcome to 2 new clients in August 2011! We hope to serve you well and trust that OneDiver will be of benefit to you and the scuba diving industry!
Check out their beautiful logos and App.
Mobile applications are triggering a fundamental shift in the way people experience computing and use mobile phones. Ten years ago, people "went to the computer" to access the Internet and searched for information. Today, smartphones empower us to make instant comparisons and purchasing decisions wherever we are. Mobile access is global, social, and personal. And smartphones have out-sold the incumbent Personal Computer. Businesses are getting onto the mobile app bandwagon -- and they know these are the customers who have the largest spending power and social influence.
Give your customers something to talk about
- Announce your mobile app to your customers, get them to download and start browsing. In-app features allow them to keep coming back for more! From making a custom reservation, view their dive buddies or simply log a dive!!
Good practices to use in your mobile app
- Broadcast monthly updates, sales and promotions to keep your divers aware of what is going on. They are your fans after all, just avoid spamming them. Link your account to Facebook and harness the effect of Social Networks.
Have your own business mobile app? How are your customers using them today?
The early adopters of OneDiver gave and still give a lot of useful feedback about the system. Sometimes they give interesting anecdotes too. This post is one such anecdote written to us by one of our earliest adopters.
Our shop adopted OneDiver in it’s earliest form of times long past. A time when errors were prolific, social networking meant meeting people in the real world and dinosaurs still roamed the CPU landscape.
Once, I was approached by this guy on fb (that’s short for facebook, get with the times!) he wanted to be my friend. I truly did not recognize him and being the curious sort as well as not highly inclined to befriending total strangers, I asked him : “Do we know each other?”
Stranger: “No, we were on the same trip together."
Me ( Feeling bad): "Are you one of my students?"
Stranger: "No, we were on the the same trip to Hantu, and another local trip with your shop last year."
At this point, I was thinking, SHAME! How could I forget a face, names pass me by but faces usually stick. So I checked out my trips for the previous year on OneDiver. Our shop has the nasty habit of recording everything, which I was thankful for in the extreme, and I could not find this guy at all. He was not even one of our divers. Liar, liar pants on fire. Just another fb stalker.
Me (Peeved): "I cannot find you on any of my trips, are you sure we dived together?"
Liar (Scrambling): "Oh, it was the same boat, not with your shop but with XYZ diveshop."
After this, I ignored him because I was completely certain he was just lying.It is just that with OneDiver, I was able to outstalk him!
2 months ago, our SMS server was down. Some of our dive operators are on the platinum which includes SMS reminder for all events (eg. Theory, Confined Water and Trips). Only then we realized some of our dive operators depended on our system for their daily operations.
Firstly, I would need to apologize again to all our dive operators that were affected. Though the effects were very minimal but "we got the message". Some of our dive operators have become so used to having OneDiver, they stop sending manual reminders to their students and divers.
So during that few hours of the SMS failure, a few groups of different dive customers were either late or didn't attend the classes.
How it works? Our SMS reminder will send out everyday at 7pm (+8 GMT) to remind all the upcoming event for the following day. The SMS will work on any number including foreign number, it has also the footer as a promotional area for your dive operator customize on their messages.
Working in a new environment with a new system is always hard to get the hand of, but with OneDiver as a system it makes life just so much easier.
The story that I have learned from an employee whom deal with the general administration of a dive center. She was describing her first encounter of being the only staff in the dive center and how OneDiver helped.
Being the only person tending the shop, makes handling call enquiries a challenging task at times. For example when she is away for delivering tanks to the pool and customers called up for information on upcoming courses availability. And all she needs was her smart phone, she could answer most of those enquires and naturally closes more business.
As our society evolves, customer's expectation becomes more sophisticated. They expect instant information, reliable content and quick services. Not necessarily it has be OneDiver so long the system possess such capabilities you should adopt it if you have yet to do so.
We all know how powerful Facebook is but have you wondered about the true potential of Facebook for businesses?
Combining what OneDiver systems offer with Facebook makes marketing extremely effective. For example, you can add divers into Facebook by inviting them and because you added these divers into your trips. You have a record of them, you can also add them in your Facebook as groups. Combining these 2 systems, your end results are the ability to organize gathering based on trips.
Future. We are shaping our next version of OneDiver, it will contain a lot of complementary features with Facebook. Our objective is to help you save time and be twice as lively on Facebook and other social media with your diving activities as the central topic. Keep a look out on this.
Continued education is all the courses that follow after the Open Water Diver Course. OneDiver creates a database of all your students, where they went and what they did which entails the dive operator to follow up on their customers with more effective marketing. When you have something to sell, you can rest assured, the audience are definitely more targeted and more likely they welcome your "recommendation" rather than treating your campaign as advertising.
After completing the Open Water Course, divers are usually very excited for their next dive but due to the lack of contact from the dive centres among other reasons, they usually fail to continue with the Advanced Open Water Course. OneDiver has many features that enable you to accomplish this task with much ease.
Many people probably heard of the term CRM (Customer Relationship Management), but what does it actually mean for a dive operator. Big companies spend millions on systems that allow them to use systematic ways to management their customer, keeping them happy, providing better value to them, etc etc.
For dive operators, a powerful CRM has been out of reach before this and free CRM systems are not exactly very useful because these applications are too broad but OneDiver was created with only dive operator in mind.
Once a diver becomes a customer at your dive center, you will probably never need to get their sizing for equipment rental because OneDiver has a record of these information. Customers are usually delighted when they know you took effort to remember their preference. OneDiver will be there to assist your dive center as a customer oriented one.
I was on my way to a dive site and I overheard a conversation between a diver and a dive operator.
Dive Operator: "I need to get back to work, quite a bit of paperwork to settle"
Diver: "What are you talking about? Ain't your job about diving and sun tanning?"
The dialogue left a deep impression and reflected what the diving business is like to an average diver.
You probably remember filling up forms, declaring your health, listing down emergency contact and so on. Those information are crucial in times of emergency and keeping a record of all the paper can be quite a chore.
When OneDiver team took on the task to build OneDiver, one of our goals was to reduce paperwork. And I believe some of the dive operators have benefited from our effort so to name a few of those benefits.
Till I write again, thanks for reading..
Whilst on the surface interval of a recent dive trip, I was talking to the other divers on the boat and I was suprised to hear from them, although they have been diving a lot, they find it time consuming to organise dive trips.
Finding resorts with spaces, matching it with the correct flights so to make the most of the diving. All these can be quite a pain. The users of our dive operators' app told us, the app helped quite a bit to ease dive trips planning.
One cool thing users love about the app is that they could get a lot of dive trip information in one hit.
The ability for your divers to see all your upcoming dive trips is essential, as it helps them to plan ahead, allow them to prepare before hand, be it financially or logistically.
Putting these dive trips schedule on their mobile phone brings another advantage, they could show their friends (possibile dive buddies) the dive details, pricing and even photos of the dive places.
In summary, OneDiver does not create additional tasks for your business operations, just listing your trips schedule as usual, but doing it on a different calendar system instead. Now, when done with OneDiver, it brings more benefits hence more business. Give it go at no cost