The latest Release for ScoreBoard was unveiled on March 9. Packed with loads of great new features, tailored to help hoteliers navigate through the volatility of the market right now, these new features enable more dynamic reporting, as well as forward-looking data for up to 13 months in advance.
I caught up with Jessica Clayton, Senior Product Manager for ScoreBoard, to hear more about how these new features will bring greater benefits to our users.
Jessica, can you tell us a little bit more about ScoreBoard and what it does?
Of course! So Scoreboard sits within Duetto’s suite of products and exists as our reporting and business intelligence tool. We have a few different modules - for creating dashboards, running custom reports, and of course, we also have our forecast and budget builder. For this release, we focused on enhancing our custom Report Builder and creating new features that will really help customers dive into their data much more dynamically.
How is Scoreboard helping to address the shift in demand as guests start to return?
A huge initiative for this release was to enable our customers to look at their reporting on different timelines. So, unlike previous years when customers could rely on same time last year (STLY) or historical representation, the market right now is changing much more dynamically. We have government regulations, we have vaccine news, we have shut downs and openings that are happening on a weekly or monthly basis around the world and not in congruence across different markets. So what we’ve tried to do is really enable customers to look specifically at the times that make sense for their market to be able to analyze their data.
That's great. Please tell us about the four new features for this Release.
Okay! I think the most exciting feature that we have this release, enabled for the first time in customer reporting, is a custom date range comparison. As our customers know already, for their reports they can go in and set a custom date range for that report. Now, in addition to their custom date range, they can set a comparison custom date range. If they choose the start date of that comparison date range, our system will automatically select the number of days to match the original custom date range. And it’ll go ahead and show that data in the custom report. This enables customers to compare; they know their pick up for events that may have previously happened in a different time of year, but were shifted because of COVID regulations, or promotional success - running a promotion at different times of year or different days of the week - so they can view the success of that promotion in their pick up or other metrics that they're looking at.
That's great. Does this have a forward-looking element for when and if you wanted to change the month of an event or a promotion?
Yes! Our custom date range comparison actually allows you to look up to 13 months behind, or up to 13 months ahead, which really enables a wide variety of perspectives when reviewing data.
Fantastic. So what’s the next feature?
For easy comparisons customers can now, at the bottom of their custom Report Builder screen, select: ‘same time last week’, ‘same time two weeks ago’, or ‘same time four weeks ago’. Previously, a lot of decisions were based on ‘last year’ or ‘two years ago’, but right now that's not necessarily something we need to reflect on until we get out of the COVID pandemic. For right now, customers can go in and quickly see how their market demand has changed compared to last week or two weeks ago.
That's terrific; another feature that’s really going to help people out in these unpredictable times! What else?
For all of our reporting types, we now also have the ability to hide zero rows in reports. During this time, customers may have some rate codes or some group business that just isn't coming right now. Not as many people are flying and that certainly limits things, such as corporate business. In a lot of the reports, we were still showing that code but it showed all zeros because that market just wasn't active. Now, however, when customers create their report, they're able to block their rows with all zeros meaning they can get the reports with only the data that’s showing movement. This enables the customer to get more concrete reports and target their marketing towards customers looking to travel.
I see, it sounds great! So what’s the last feature?
The last one has been highly requested by our larger customers. Last year we released custom pick up metrics within Scoreboard and so we've now expanded the custom pick up capability for cross property reporting. This means that if a customer has a variety of different hotels, and they run a promotion across all of them, they're now able to view the pick up success rate across those different hotels, which is really helpful for our larger customers and even smaller customers with multiple hotels. It's important to note that we do have some customers with hotels in a variety of different time zones. So for the cross property, custom pick up, we use the time zone of the user who is running the report for all hotels included. Whereas at the individual level, we will retain custom pick up metrics calculated at the hotel level time zone.
To finish, it’s important to add that all of these features are also available via our scheduled reporting feature. In addition to improving all of our customers’ reports, they can view in Duetto via scheduled reporting and we will actually send all of these improvements straight to their inbox or server.
More information about Scoreboard can be found on www.duettocloud.com/scoreboard