Now that you’ve met patron expectations, it’s time to maximize their experiences. What is expected? What can your facility do to increase satisfaction? In this newsletter, you will find education, training, news, and updates, so that you can provide your patrons with blue ribbon experiences.

We looked around the parks and recreation space to see what creates a blue ribbon experience for everyone, what’s reasonable to expect, and what departments and municipalities can do to increase satisfaction for everyone.

We found many great examples. The best-in-class examples ranged in size and geography, proving that leadership and initiative were the prime differentiators. Below are twelve areas where these forward-thinking organizations directed their focus to deliver the most value for their communities. Or take a quiz to see how you compare.

Vermont Systems Education programs offer the most efficient way to become proficient and productive with the software as well as the fastest way to onboard new employees, with options to fit any time and budget. If one of your goals is productivity – learning from and with others is a proven path.

• • • Every other Thursday at 2:00pm Eastern, RecChat offers conversations about new features, hot topics, and upcoming events. Sign up for the latest and to view archived sessions. Sign up here.
    • The RecTrac Lab: Our online series of micro-learning courses covers topics for everyone from new to advanced users. Contact us to find the right RecTrac Lab courses for you.

Our 2022 Vermont Systems Symposium is fully booked and we are very excited to see everyone in Vermont! If you were unable to register this year, we will be hosting the symposium again next year as well. Start your planning for 2023 by adding the Vermont Systems Symposium to your budget.

Introducing the Virtual Waiting Room

In the recent months we have seen an unprecedented demand for recreation programming and summer camps. With the demand for programming often outpacing the supply available, registration dates have become more eventful than ever. For larger customers with particularly high-volume events this demand has also stressed the WebTrac application. As a rapid response, Vermont Systems has introduced the Virtual Waiting Room for VS Cloud customers.

The virtual waiting room allows Vermont Systems to meter traffic destined for your WebTrac site at the onset of registration launches. This allows us to pull all patrons into a randomly assigned queue just prior to the start of the registration and then release them to your WebTrac site in a manner that promotes a positive and predictable customer experience.  We have successfully deployed the virtual waiting room for many recent high-volume registrations and are now positioned to use this as a tool if we determine the demand may exceed the ability of your WebTrac site to sustain a positive user experience.

For events that are known to Vermont Systems, we can monitor traffic leading up to the event and determine if the virtual waiting room will be needed to support the demand.  Please continue to inform our Support or Hosted Services teams of high-volume upcoming events.

RecTrac 3.1.10.11.03 is ready for download: We’re happy to announce that RecTrac Version 3.1.10.11.03 has been released!  There are many important  performance updates in this release.   We urge all departments to update as soon as possible.

Make sure to update to the latest version of RecTrac and patch files to ensure you have all the latest updates and enhancements. Our new HelpDesk employees that started training in May  are wrapping up their formal classroom training and anxious to start assisting customers this summer.   The online Live Chat continues to be the best and most popular method for customers to get a quick answer on software items. You can access chat in the Support Portal online: Home · Customer Self-Service (vermontsystems.com)   We look forward to working with you!

Implementation Team: The Municipal Implementation team continues to engage customers with  remote training, 10.3 to 3.1 migrations, and new customer onboarding and training.  Summer is a great time to work with this team on any outstanding projects as the team calendar usually has openings available each week.  2022 is the final push for customers to move from the retired 10.3 product to 3.1. Please reach out to the team if you need any additional training or have not yet scheduled your 10.3 to 3.1 migration. You can email the Sales team for quotes on training Sales@vermontsystems.com or email Brian Hatch (Implementation Manager) BrianH@vermontsystems.com with specific training questions or to set up migration discovery calls.

Education Team: The Education team (EDU) led by Zach Malloch continues working on self-help content for our users.  The EDU team has selected a new platform to publish the application Knowledge Base, Videos and Topic Docs.  Content from the current systems is being moved over to the new platform in July and we plan to launch in August of 2022.  This platform will provide you and our Support team the content you need in one portal with improved search capabilities significantly improving your support experience.  Don’t forget to check out the bi-weekly free RecChats with Zach and team on software and industry topics.   Look for the invite via the VS Connect email.

Reminders: We do encourage all customers and IT departments to keep the RecTrac version up to date to ensure you have all the latest updates and features. On-premises customers should plan to update 5 times per year. Fully hosted customers are all set and get each update loaded automatically.

Support Portal and Knowledge Base: Access the support portal to chat with an expert, access education documents, and find FAQs. Be on the lookout for the new knowledge platform mentioned above and look forward to an improved experience in the knowledge base.

VS Assist: Our team of RecTrac experts can ensure that you hit the ground running with a database and solution that’s move-in ready. Whatever your needs, VS Assist will help you reduce training requirements, accelerate your implementation timeline, and enable you to start better serving your patrons and community faster.

It’s hard not to miss the trend: the vast majority of organizations are moving to cloud-hosted solutions. The reasons are clear, Cloud Hosting simply delivers far more advantages and allows your team to focus on serving your community. But is it right for you?

Take a look around your organization and see how you would answer the questions.

Are you looking for an in-person demo of our product? Have any questions that you would like us to answer? Join us at our upcoming events:

• FRPA – Orlando, Florida, August 29-September 1, 2022
• NRPA – Phoenix, Arizona, September 20-22, 2022 – Booth # 2333

If you can’t meet with us in person, but would like to schedule a meeting with the Vermont Systems team, click below and we would be happy to schedule a meeting with you.