History of the Check-in app (part 2)

As other check-in solutions surfaced, ours seemed to maintain a preferential position in the marketplace.  I believe that the preference was built not strictly on the capability I described yesterday, many solutions began providing much of the same, but also the intangibles such as:

• Ease of use - Rick did an excellent job defining the work flow, tweaking the button sizes, using color, and overall presentation
• Speed of check in - using the last 4 digits for search was brilliant, I don't have to spell your name, I don't have to type the full phone number, etc.; time saver.  After the phone search we bring the most active households to the top of the result list; time saver.  We automatically select the most appropriate room based on pre-assignment, best fit by age, and balance the rooms automatically; time saver.  Bypassing the driver on the printer; huge time saver.  I can go on and on, but it was this type of detail that made our solution so fast

Rick put in a lot of time studying kiosk solutions, workflow, and process before he designed the app; it really paid off for us.

While I can't discount the importance of child safety for this type of solution, that is only one aspect of it.  To get a real grip on the church population and their Christian maturity we equally emphasized ease of attendance collection across all situations not just children; this includes youth, adults, and especially volunteers.  In my mind, the single most important aspect of what we provided was the idea that this was one piece of a much bigger puzzle; attendance is a critical part to a growing church (see Should you track attendance?) and this feeds that engine. 

Because check-in was so tightly integrated with our overall solution, the market may have preferred what we had to offer, but wasn't always willing to take the step required to replace the back office system they already had to get it; while we frequently question why a church would want to stay rooted with the old solution, I can't blame 'em, it can be a very disruptive process and requires commitment from the top, we do things differently.  Jeff Hook (our CEO) started talking about separating Check-in as a stand alone product; many of us struggled with the idea since we were so passionate about the total solution, but in the end we decided it was the best thing for our company and our vision (it could add an additional revenue stream and get our foot in the door).  This is when we began offering multiple editions including a "check-in only" option.  So now you know.