One of the huge wins of coaching software is to keep a running record of actions and performance metrics.  It makes it easy for you to know at a glance how your client is doing (way better than burning through precious coaching session minutes getting the progress update), allows you to give insightful support based on what is and isn’t working, and gives both you and your client a tangible sense of progress and accomplishment as records accumulate.

The key to realizing these benefits is to make it super easy for a client to keep these records up to date.  Having them log in each day to record what’s new is a lot to ask, trust me.  Over the summer I built a way for my clients to update the system by responding to text reminders, for both actions and metrics.  “Just enter your cell and set up text reminders” I told them, and this worked/works swimmingly for me and my peeps.

But for logistical and technological reasons, CoachAccountable supports SMS interactions only for US cell numbers.  No problem, I figured I’d have some time to handle international users later.  But it turns out that, when I launched last week, one of the first day sign ups happens to be from a fellow based in China.

Looks like the internationalization capacities of CoachAccountable are being tested sooner than later.

So there is to make on-the-fly client data entry available to all, and today I’m releasing a feature that does just that.  Now email reminders can be used for updating things just as easily as text messaging can be.  If you set a reminder email for an action, simply replying to the email with “done” is all it takes to mark it complete in CoachAccountable.  If you have a daily email reminder for tracking your minutes of exercise, just replying “30 a run around the lake” will add that number for today along with your annotation.

So reminders are twice as nice: they keep your client aware of what they’re working on, and allow them to enter and track their progress in seconds.

Writing the reply email looks like this:

And then a minute later the client page shows this: