Overview

The Direct Delivery system provides a dynamic mechanism for doorstep delivery within the local region, supplies can be via Area Agents or direct to the deliverer. There is a comprehensive system for calculating wages, including National Minimum Wage, together with the flexibility to easily manage temporary holiday changes.

An easy to use telephone and doorstep canvassing system helps generate new sales. Doorstep canvassing can be interfaced to a PDA enabling canvass data and results to rapidly transfer from and to the main system.

For customers outside the local region there’s a Postal Subscriptions system to ensure readers, wherever they are in the world, receive their favourite publications.

Features

The Direct Delivery system provides delivery information down to household level. Where a property has multiple-occupancy there can be one or more Reader Accounts, which in turn may have one or more Reader Orders. Flexible payment terms accommodate pre-paid orders as well as invoiced orders at both account and area agent level and where necessary invoicing can be to a separate billing address. Should a reader’s payments become overdue, a credit status which can also be set via a third party sales ledger can be used to prevent further deliveries.

One of the most demanding aspects of direct delivery is managing reader holidays. Here NCS allows delivery suspensions to be set up by account with a date range and an associated suspension reason; this automatically reverts once the end date has been reached.

Delivery round information uses sequenced lists of specific addresses to ensure the most efficient walk time. By linking employees to rounds via date ranges a complete round history is created of who worked which round and when; this is useful for managing wages queries and non-delivery complaints. A particularly useful feature is the ability to automatically replace employees for a given date range to cover holidays etc. Employee wages allow for payment methods including fixed amounts by number of copies and by publication size. Wages are calculate by the system, including National Minimum Wage, and can be paid in cash, via BACS or exported to a third party payroll system.

An integrated Customer Complaints logging system provides reporting and analysis by complaint type. It’s also possible to book non-deliveries which will automatically adjust the invoice or number of prepaid copies.

A Subscription module enables postal delivery of reader publications and can be set up using a rate card to obtain the total price for a given period. Invoiced orders can, if required, be linked to the rate card such that cover price changes are automatically applied.

The Canvassing module is a quick and easy sales tool for constructing address lists for walk and telephone canvassing campaigns within the publisher’s circulation area. For canvassing, the reader address database can be populated manually or from a third party source with names and telephone numbers, the system also enables Telephone Preference Service data to be imported. Existing readers can also be excluded from campaigns if required.

An address wizard provides a simple step by step method of creating each campaign with the option to filter existing customers, certain address types etc. These can be divided into canvass boards for individual canvassers and produced as printer lists or exported to PDA’s. PDA’s have the advantage that the results can be re-imported saving time and ensuring accuracy.

Where gratis copies are distributed to prospective readers ahead of a canvass campaign the system automatically applies the additional copies to the relevant rounds.

Canvassing can also be used for existing customer quality control checking as well as generating new sales.

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