Elle11

A communication system with no central place for notifications

Imagine if you will, that you are a business with over 100, 500, or 1000 clients, multiple locations and the software you chose for your business that prides itself on being able to effectively communicate with your customers has the following:

1. No Notification Center within the software. Notifications are sent by email only and when asking support how to see them within the software, they say clients “make email folders for their notification categories that they receive from Opus”.

Really? Can you image if this was the case for Facebook, Quickbooks, or any other software in this day and age?

This means the only way you can find any activity (message sent by a client, payment made by a client, etc.) is to search for your email notifications from Opus (and as a business owner, I get too many notifications to go through) and then manually search for the client and go into the client’s portal.

2. Client’s can only have one email for contact purposes and the software is for music schools that have children taking classes (there should be multiple email allowed for emergencies, like public and private schools allow).

3. When signing up, since a client can only be associated with one email, if they sign up with another email, they can create a duplicate account for them and their entire family (multiple children) and the system will not notify the owner that multiple accounts with the same name has been done, unless you look up that particular client and the system will not flag the account from being created with the same exact name and same exact family members created under them.

The only options is the merge the two clients together to allow all the schedules that were set up on the account set up by the owner to be saved, otherwise it has to be reentered (invoices, registering a student for a class, assigning a staff member, class materials uploaded into account). Can you imagine have to do this for 20, 50, or more clients right before classes are about to start?

3. The communication platform is faulty because a parent needs to have a profile to be the account manager but can only communicate by direct message to ONLY the staff that is assigned to their student (not to an Office Manager or Owner) and can only communicate to the teacher by using their student’s profile and not their own problem (for example if they have a billing issue).

The question is, why even have the parent have a profile at all? Can you imagine if every business made any potential client that may pay the bill for an account at a particular service address (for example an AT&T bill), create an account solely to be an account manager (i.e. someone who pays a bill)?

There does not seem to be another purpose to the parent account as almost all students taking classes are under 18 and most would not have their own emails to sign up and manage their own accounts anyway (age of most students is between 5-13 years old). If they do have an email, it is a school email that can not be used for outside school emails anyway.

4. When setting up monthly recurring payments, the system is set for the first of the month and if you want to start a class in the middle of the month, they only option is to prorate the first month, as the system will not recognize the first payment with signup fee as the first month of service.

This has made me have to go in as soon as my clients pay and have to zero out the next bill, so that the client doesn’t get charged again for a full month, in less than a week, by autopay. Again, can you imagine if you had to do this for 100, 500, or 1000 clients?

The customer support is fantastic and always accessible, reason for three stars.

However, there are still a lot of clinks to work out with this software to make it function as advertised and I am sure I have only hit the top of the iceberg.

To pay more than $100 per month for this software before an internal software Notification Center is created seems ridiculous to me and I can’t imagine how other bigger businesses are getting around this major limitation.