It was the second week of March and here in New York we didn’t like what we were seeing. It was still a week and a half away from the “New York on PAUSE” order, but the writing was clear on the wall, so on Friday the 13th of March we pushed out our first Covid-19 update. Realizing that communications would be critical, the team pushed out new links for users to be able to generate a variety of different email lists, ready to be imported into a bulk-mailer like Constant Contact or MailChimp.
Even as that went out, we realized that it was likely that there would be a wave of cancellations coming, and so that Monday we introduced new “Stop Cancelled” features. The details of the government aid were not yet released, but we figured that everyone would need reports of their Covid-19 cancellations for something, so we worked through the weekend and got this released on Monday.
Then we heard about something we didn’t think about at all, when we started being asked what drivers should when they showed up to shred and the customers doors were locked. And that, in turn, was followed by the request for a way to bill minimums if a driver showed up and the customer was closed without having said anything. An update to the mobile app was rushed through development so that drivers had a way to mark the stop as “premises closed”, with those jobs funneling in a special way to the Biller who can decide whether to invoice them or void them, depending upon circumstances.
Roy’s team also sprung into action. We had one customer with hundreds of stops at their State University. We bulk cancelled those for them until May… which seemed then to be an amazing amount of time. Since then we’ve again cancelled all the stops until August.
This has been a tough time for all of our customers, but we can take some satisfaction from the one customer who said:
“Thank goodness we had you to get us through this. I don’t know how we would have managed if we weren’t able to keep up with all the changes so easily, and with a record of who cancelled”.
