The CoachAccountable Blog

I first made the acquaintance of Tambre Leighn about a year ago.  She had a trial account and was poking around, and asked some of the big questions.  Language translations?  Content licensing?  Independent branding for sub-accounts?

It was clear that she had big intentions.  A month later I was on a conference call with Tambre and a few of her colleagues, featuring more hard hitting questions concerning security, infrastructure, reseller arrangements, and oh by the way how well could your system handle 10- or 20-thousand users all doing the same program¹?

I let her know afterwards it was a pleasure to be on that call, being hit by the big questions is the stuff of having my creation be under serious consideration for the sake of serious plans.  To this she replied:

When you lose the love of your life, the only thing left to do, if you’re me, is to play the biggest game ever inspired by his legacy. 14 million plus survivors, many struggling with the collateral damage of cancer, are out there in need. Yes, big is fun and awesome…more to come ;)

And that was my first real taste of the passion and flair driving the Well Beyond This program.

Well Beyond This is a cancer survivor’s program, helping people thrive with, through, and beyond the disease.  I personally have been thus far fortunate enough to not have been afflicted by cancer, but even from this sideline position I find the intention and focus of the program to be uplifting, making it one of those “Oh I’m so glad that exists in the world” sort of things.

WBT recognizes that patients of conventional medicine are left largely on their own when it comes to dealing with depression, stress, fatigue and so forth, and fills in the gaps by giving participants the tools to strengthen relationships, cultivate motivation and coping mechanisms, and empowering a happier and more balanced life.

Last month Tambre was in town, coming to Denver for CancerCon.  Given the past months of strategy conference calls, developer collaboration, and the successful launch of the pilot program, I was honored that she could fit me into her busy visit.

Over a hot bowl of noodles (Tambre gets adventuresome points for trying pho for the first time) I got better acquainted with the history and background of the project.  Tambre lost her husband to cancer some years ago, and despite her and her husband having the luxuries of being rather fit, financially stable, and surrounded by a loving and supportive community, found the ordeal incredibly difficult and taxing.  It made her think wow, what if you’re not so blessed by circumstance going into it?  How do you deal with that?

It gave her the drive to create something to help support others, both patients and their loved ones, in powerfully dealing with the disease.  Armed with the training and methodology of IPEC Coaching, she created the Well Beyond This program as a means to help the millions of others out there.

If I was honored to get to meet her for lunch on this visit, that quite pales compared to the honor I feel getting to play a part in bringing this program to life by virtue of CA being its delivery platform.

We lingered over our lunch and good conversation for a lovely two hours, finding no shortage of things to talk about in the intersection of our works.  I even learned she’s a seasoned dancer and invited her out to my usual Friday night out of swing dancing at the Denver Turnverein.  (She was keen but didn’t make it out–had a private party invite come up for the night.  I totally get it–private parties are the best during an out of town conference, amiright?)

Thanks Tambre for making time to hang out–I’m inspired by what you, Ed and the rest of the gang are up to, and again, am super honored to play a part in it!

A lovely shot of us on the 16th Street mall–no selfie stick required.

Yes, the title of this post is crude and vulgar.

But we all know it when we experience it.  It can be maddening enough that any gentler term would be whitewashing of how it leaves us.

The other day I got an email invoice for my annual service with a company that, to protect the guilty, shall not be called out specifically.  It was for about twice the amount I paid for the previous years of which I’ve been a customer, and invoice contained these friendly words:

Thank you for your purchase! Please contact billing@____.com with questions or concerns.

Hey, I have a question or concern!  I mean the new price isn’t a big deal ($30 became $60), but such an unannounced price hike seems worth asking about.  So I wrote:

Hello!

I notice my price for one year of _____  this year ($60) is up substantially from what it was last year ($35), and that is up from what I originally signed up for in 2013 (and paid again in 2014), $29.99.

I don’t recall getting any notification about any impending price increase, what gives?

Thanks,
John

Within seconds I got back the following message:

Thank you for contacting ___ Customer Support,

This email notification was in regards to services in your account at http://___.com. If you require an invoice from your renewal, you can generate one in your account. To do so:

1. Log into your account at ___.com
2. Under the Billing header, click on “Payment History”
3. Click the “View Details” link next to the purchase
4. Click the “Printable Invoice” link on the next page

If you would like to cancel your services, you may do so through your account at http://___.com. To cancel your ____ service:
1. Log into your account at ___.com, using…

To cancel ____ …
1. Log into your account at ___.com…

As long as the service is cancelled within 30 days of the purchase, your services will be refunded automatically. Please allow a minimum of 48 hours for your refund to be sent to your payment issuer. Once it reaches the payment issuer, it is at their discretion as to how long it will take for the funds to post back onto your account.

Thank you,

___ Customer Support

Sigh.  Okay, clearly answered by a robot.  But at least the from email address seemed to indicate a real person, some dude name Kevin.  So I wrote back:

Hi,

As best I can tell that reply addresses absolutely none of what I just asked.  Can you tell me when the pricing was approximately doubled and why the first time I’m learning about it is when I get an invoice for my next year?

It’s not a big deal and I’m mostly happy to stay on as a customer, it just feels like quite an abrupt price increase with no warning.

That was sent 4 days ago.  No reply.

In a sense, I get it: I’m just a $60/year customer (at least that’s higher than I was before!) and my gripe (actually not so much a gripe as a question) is a matter of $25, $30.01 tops.  This issue might not warrant a thoughtful response, let alone from a human.  And in fact a less charitable reading of the response might suggest I DID get an answer to my question: a lot of words that boil down to “If you don’t like it and want to cancel, here’s how”.  (The “and go fuck yourself” subtext exists, admittedly, only in my imagination.)

But whichever way I slice it, what a sour taste this leaves me as a customer–such unresponsive service to a genuine inquiry.

Doing all of the customer service these last three and half years for CoachAccountable has made me particularly sensitive to seeing it done sloppily by other companies.  Certainly this is unfair, as I’m comparing the passion of a founder to whatever legions of support teams the big companies have to cobble together, but I still just don’t get how you can allow a really poor job to be done of it.

I’m just one dude and I handle hundreds of customers and thousands of users.  In the last 48 hours I have:

• Spent 45 minutes helping one user tweak the layout and functionality of some of her Worksheet Templates.
• Issued a refund of 5 months of invoices on an account that was canceled which I noticed had simply been quite dormant (this was unrequested, I explained that I sleep better at night knowing that folks are getting their money’s worth out of the system).
• Built and launched a new feature within hours of the request (per-appointment type availability rules).
• Chatted for 30 minutes with a power user of what they want to do next with the system and where things are headed.

And in the middle of writing this blog post I spent time consulting on how best to deliver a group program at scale with rolling admission, including how the software development to employ the CoachAccountable API should be handled.

What I’m trying to say is if you’re like me you’ve had your share of shitty customer service moments, where it’s just painful to do business with a company and/or you’re left to feel insignificant and unsupported.  And amid that kind of experience, putting your trust into a system & company like CoachAccountable, wherein key parts of your business hinge upon that system up and well supported, can be daunting.

To put your mind at ease I want you to know how thoroughly turned off I am by shitty customer service, and the flip side of THAT coin is that I LOVE giving SUPERB customer service.  Those bullet points above?  That’s my kind of fun, that’s what gives purpose and meaning to the many hours of heads down work spent creating CA.  That’s how I roll, and just as stated in the Terms of Awesome, that’s what my customers get to expect of me.  There will eventually be others doing the support for CoachAccountable, and you better believe they’ll be on this same page when it comes to offering that support.

It’s hard to walk away from every company that gives shitty customer service.  I’m proud to promise that you’ll never have that problem here.

CoachAccountable Appointments have undergone a few more improvements lately.  Let’s take a look!

Post-session Worksheets

The first improvement of the CA coaching software is that, in addition to setting a pre-session Worksheet to accompany a given appointment, you can now set a post-session Worksheet as well.  Like the pre- counterpart, a post-session Worksheet will be automatically sent to your clients at the time of your choosing relative to an appointment.

Post-session Worksheets are the perfect opportunity for your clients to reflect on whatever key takeaways they just got from their recent session with you, further cementing in whatever insights they got from the coaching and making it more likely that they’ll integrate into work in the coming days and weeks.  By setting that as a standard practice via CoachAccountable, you’re using the coaching management system to provide your clients with another useful touch point of support, helping them get more out of the experience.

To set one up you first create a suitable Worksheet Template (done under Library >> Worksheet Templates).  Make it tailored as specifically as possible to your style of coaching, but even generic questions that prompt your clients to reflect on the session work well.

This one is a nice example; feel free to copy anything about it you like:

Just a few questions to get ’em thinking.

(This is an example of a Form Based Worksheet.  Form Based worksheets are nice for this, check out this tutorial video if you’ve never used them.)

Once your Worksheet Template is ready, you can associate it with one of your Appointment Types.  Do this under Settings >> Appointment Config, go to the Appointment Types section and click on the one you want to have as a post-assignment:

We could have a pre-worksheet with this type of appointment, too!

From there it works just as you would expect it: any appointments you (or your clients) schedule of this type will have the post-session worksheet sent out to your client as scheduled, putting them one click away from filling it out.  Like all worksheets, once completed your client’s answers will be emailed right to you from the coach portal, giving you even more insight into how to further guide and support your client, either immediately (by replying to the email) or during your next session.  Nice!

Specific Availability per Appointment Type

The second improvement to CoachAccountable appointment scheduling is that you can now customize your weekly availability for a given Appointment Type, overriding your typical weekly availability.

Again, in your coaching dashboard under Settings >> Appointment Config you’re able to setup your typical weekly availability:

Huh, looks like I only get a lunch break on Wednesdays.

This provides the basis by which CoachAccountable offers time slots to choose when they are scheduling with you (subtracting out of course any exceptions, like other already scheduled appointments or that dental appointment you’ve got coming up in your calendar).

Now you’ve got the option to override this availability for any given Appointment Type.  When setting one up you’ve got a new option within the Visibility section:

We groove on Friday. Friday is when we groove.

As you can see in this example, for the “Friday Groove Call” type of appointment we’ve elected to make this available for clients to schedule only on Fridays.

There are a couple of scenarios in which this more fine-grained control to your availability comes in handy.

You might, for example, do certain appointments face to face, and you’re only at a given location on certain days.  So you might offer the “In person – Downtown” appointment type only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the “In person – Riverside” appointment type only on Mondays, all while having your phone-based appointment types available any day during the week.

Another example is if you’re coaching multiple programs, and, for the sake of keeping more in the flow of the material you are coaching, offer appointments for Program A only on Mondays and Wednesdays and appointments for Program B only Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And that about covers it!  These improvements allow you to give your clients a more supported experience of being coached by you, and keep your schedule better organized.  Enjoy!

Does imagining the automation of scheduling and post-session worksheets give you a sigh of relief? Try CoachAccountable for 30 days, free of charge, and see how it feels.

CoachAccountable is available only in English.  As there’s still so much to do to make this a great coaching platform within just the cozy confines of my native tongue, this will probably be the case for a good long while!

But even so, now and then I get emails which ask a good question:

Hi John,

Is there a way I can customize the CA client’s site language to another language…

My target market cannot speak or read English language :(

Talking about the “client’s site” reveals a subtle nuance: the coach side of the system is vastly more complex with much more [English] text to navigate when compared to what clients see when logged in.  Any coach who uses CA will generally need to know English in order to do so, but what about focusing on just the client side of the system?

For now there’s no such ability to switch out the full language of the client experience, so indeed if your clients don’t speak English they might find it difficult.  BUT, for what it’s worth, coaches have made it work for their non-English speaking clients by customizing the email templates and having the actual content that they enter (worksheets, session notes, and so on) be in the preferred language.  Because the lion’s share of the words your client will ever read through CoachAccountable will be the ones you wrote, not knowing English needn’t be as severe a limitation for clients as it is on the coach side of things.  A little bit of vocab coupled with your content can be quite manageable, once they find their way around the basics.

During your free trial the system makes it super easy to set things up and then see them from the client side of things, so that you can explore whether or not you are able to make it workable.

If you’d like to give it a try, be sure to go to My CA >> My System >> System Communications to find the place where you can customize the full text of all emails the system sends on your behalf.

All of these templates can be rewritten in the language of choice.

One other idea that might help is to setup a Whiteboard for your clients explaining a little bit of the key vocab (like what each of the tabs like Stream, Actions, and Metrics mean).  If you’re not familiary, here’s a guide to how Whiteboards work.

CoachAccountable currently isn’t designed for non-English speakers, but  with a little bit of setup and customization you still can leverage all the tools it provides for your non-English speaking clients.

A major piece of CoachAccountable is scheduling and managing client appointments.  A lot of coaches ask “how do I sync my CoachAccountable appointments with my regular calendar, and how does that work?”

(By “regular calendar” I am referring to whichever online calendar system you already use regularly– Apple iCal and Microsoft Outlook are by far the most prevalent.)

CoachAccountable has a direct sync with your Google Calendar (instructions HERE), but if you use another calendar keep reading.

Syncing is key for two reasons.  One, because you want your CA Appointments to appear right along side all of your other stuff, allowing you to see your complete schedule.  (Moreover you want this without having to manually enter your CA appointments into your regular calendar, because who has time for double data entry?)  Two, because when scheduling your appointments within CA you want to know when you’re actually free, to avoid double bookings.

These two reasons together form a two-way street: how to get your CoachAccountable appointment data into your regular calendar (so that it shows up there), and how to get your regular calendar data into CoachAccountable (so that CA can prevent double booking).

CA provides the way to do each of these two directions of syncing, and it’s important to understand what each direction does as they are quite distinct.

CA to your regular calendar: To have your appointments which were made in CA show up within your regular calendar, CA offers a data feed URL of those appointments.  By adding this URL to your regular calendar system (“Add by URL” or “Subscribe”, the wording to do this varies from system to system) you allow your regular calendar to pull that data in so that it shows alongside the rest of your schedule, allowing you to thus see the whole picture.

This data feed URL can be found within Settings >> Appointment Config >> Calendar Feed.

This URL is all you need to add your CA appointments to any calendar.

Your regular calendar to CA: To inform CA of when exactly you are busy, so that CA doesn’t offer those time slots to your clients when they’re trying to book (and similarly gives you as coach a warning if you attempt to book something when you’re already busy), CA allows you to enter up to 3 calendar feeds.  This is the same mechanism but in reverse: instead of CA giving you a data feed URL to be added to your calendar, you need to find the data feed URL offered by your calendar and paste it in to CA.  Again, how or where to get this data feed URL varies from system to system, but most calendar systems which are web-based in nature offer this.

Here’s what the interface to do this within CA looks like, found within Settings >> Appointment Config >> Availability Exceptions.

Click on + Calendar to add one.

Just paste in the magic URL from your calendar and CA will pull in the data.

Together setting up these two steps make the full, two-way sync.  The intended workflow is that you use whatever calendar you usually would the way you usually do (which is nice: no new calendaring system to learn, just a one-time setup step and then it’s business as usual), and then CA appointments effortlessly pipe in there to give you the full picture (while getting the benefit of all that CA does for facilitating coaching appointments: reminders, client-initiated scheduling, worksheets, hours tracking, piping into the calendars of your clients, etc.).

Whether you use the method above or direct sync with your Google Calendar, you’ll most certainly find it convenient to have coaching appointments automatically appear for you. Sign up for a free 30-day trial and get the calendar up and running in about 2 minutes!

CoachAccountable Team Edition gives coaching organizations flexibility to accommodate their organizational structure.  The key to this is the system of Pairing and Permissions.

Let’s look at these two systems in greater detail.

Pairing

Pairing is the process of matching up which coaches are allowed to access which clients, and at what level.  If a coach has any access to a client at all, it’s at one of three levels:

1. Primary.  At this level a coach is the primary coach for a client.  Every client has exactly one primary coach at all times.  It is the primary coach who shows up as the “My Coach” for the client, and the primary is the default recipient of notifications pertaining to a client.
2. Coaching.  At this level a coach is actively coaching a client (much like the client’s Primary coach).  “Actively coaching” means that the coach can assign Actions, setup Metrics, and so on for the client.
3. View only.  At this level a coach is NOT actively coaching a client.  Instead, the coach only has access to view a client’s file but can in no way participate.  At this level the coach is effectively invisible to the client: a client cannot see coaches who have only view only access.

The pairing interface is accessed by clicking the “Pairing” button either on a given coach from the Coaches tab, or a given client from the Clients tab.

Here’s a look at the pairing interface from the perspective of a coach:

Looks like Aarthi is coaching four, has view-only access to two, and no access to the rest.

Setting the pairing is as simple as clicking the radio button for the desired coaching relationship.

By doing this you can very specifically set exactly who (and in what way) a given coach can interact with.

The pairing interface from the perspective of a client works very similarly:

John, Mira, and Rob are coaching Cassandra (John’s the primary); Jeannine has view-only access; and the others have no access at all.

One quirk of setting the pairing from the perspective of a client: SOMEONE has to be the primary coach, so you couldn’t click to toggle off the “Primary” status from a given coach–you instead have to click “change” underneath the primary coach in order to pull the “Primary” status away.

Whether you accomplish it from the coaches’ perspective or the clients’ (or a combination of both), you are able to set the pairing any way you like to precisely control who gets to interact with who.

Permissions

Permissions is the collection of settings that dictate what a given member of your team is and is not allowed to do.

To find and set the permissions for a given person, find them under the Team Members tab and click their respective “Manage” button:

The Team Members tab is, of course, located only on the Team Dashboard.

From the Manage Team Member screen, click “Permissions” to bring up the permissions section:

Lotta check boxes here. Mostly self-explanatory.

Let’s go through how things are set up for Bob.

The first and perhaps most important setting here is whether Bob is actually one of the team coaches (who will be actively coaching clients) OR if he has instead only an administrative role.  Having only an administrative role would mean Bob is NOT in the active pool of coaches who can be paired with clients, and thus wouldn’t appear in that context at all.

Because Bob is a team coach, there are some options as to what he is or isn’t allowed to do:

• Schedule his own appointments.  Perhaps in your organization these are set only by an administrator who manages client appointment scheduling.  If so, we would uncheck this permission.  If, on the other hand, Bob should be free to schedule his own appointments with clients, checking this allows him to do so.
• Issue invoices to his clients.  Should Bob be able to manage his own client invoicing through the system?  Like appointments, this is something that might be handled only at the administrative level, in which case we would uncheck this.
• Issue Agreements to his clients. Agreements might be an organization-wide standard that’s been evaluated by your legal department, for example. If individual team members should not have the ability to create his own Agreement templates or send new Agreements to his clients, uncheck this.
• Delete his clients’ agreed-to Agreements. With this permission, Bob can delete an Agreement even if a client has already signed/agreed to it. In general, agreed-to Agreements demonstrate part of the coaching record. We recommend instead issuing a new Agreement in most cases. Note that this permission is not available if the team member can’t issue the Agreements (the permission above), so these two are somewhat a pair.
• Add and manage his clients.  If Bob is able to more freely manage his collection of clients in the system, we would check this.  This type of permission is often not granted to organization coaches and is instead reserved as an administrative privilege.  If granted, know that clients added by your coach count towards your subscription plan (we can of course delete or deactivate any clients added by Bob, with our administrative privilege).
• Delete his clients. This enables Bob to completely delete a client account. Deleted client accounts cannot be restored, so we generally recommend deactivating instead.
• Manage other coach memberships within his groups.  Checking this will allow Bob to add other team coaches to be part of his coaching groups.  This is useful if you do team coaching within your coaching groups.  We don’t necessarily need to enable this for any given coach, as we could also manage these multi-coach group setups as an administrator.

Which clients Bob is paired with defines the effective “silo” into which Bob’s coaching activities are confined, and his Coaching Permissions dictate what he can do within that silo.

After the Coaching Permissions there are a slew of Administrative Permissions.  Administrative Permissions describe what an individual is allowed to do at the organization-wide level. These are organized by role type.

Appointment Management

• Schedule appointments for all team coaches.  This enables someone to set up, modify, and cancel appointments for all coaches on the team.  This is perfect for someone in your organization who’s responsible for setting and managing coach/client appointments.

Business Management

• Create and manage invoices for the team.  This allows an individual to create invoices for all clients within your account.  Whoever manages client billing should have this.
• Set up and manage Offerings. Offerings allow people to sign up and pay for coaching. This permission allows the team member to create new Offerings, edit existing ones, and delete them.
• Manage Client Engagements. Engagements track your coaching products and packages. With this permission enabled, the team member can create Engagement templates, edit existing ones, and delete them. Also, this allows the team member to start, modify, or end an Engagement for all clients.

Legal Management

• Share Agreement Templates with the rest of the team and issue Agreements to all clients. As with the coach-level permission above, the Agreement Templates your organization uses may have been given the green light from your legal team. If someone on that team or with that type of role should be able to create new Agreement Templates that the rest of the team can use, check this. Also note that this permission enables Bob to issue Agreements to all clients, not just his own.
• Delete agreed-to Agreements. Again, we recommend that Agreements generally stay as part of the coaching record. However, if an Agreement that has been signed should still be deleted, enable this permission. Note that without the permission above, a team member will not be able to delete Agreements.

Accessing Team Resources

• Access the Files & Templates Library. This enables the team member to view and download the Files in your Library, as well as Session Note and Worksheet templates.
• Access Courses. This lets a team member see the Courses that have been created within the account. He can also create his own Courses and add clients or Groups as participants.
• Clone shared team Courses. This allows an individual to make copies of Courses, whether Bob has created them or others have created them. These cloned Courses may be edited by the individual who made the clones, without altering anything in the original Course.

Master Coach

• Share Session and Worksheet Templates with the rest of the team.  This allows an individual to designate the templates that he or she creates as a shared resource, available for use by any of the other coaches with any of their respective clients.  This is meant for someone in the “master coach” role, the one responsible for designing the forms and content for use throughout your organization’s processes and programs.
• Share Library Files with the rest of the team.  This allows an individual to designate certain Library Files that he or she uploads as a shared resource, available for use by any of the other coaches.  This effectively allows someone to be the keeper and distributor of key files within your organization.
• Share Courses with the rest of the team.  This allows an individual to designate certain Courses that he or she has designed as a shared resource.  This is meant for someone responsible for designing the standardized programs offered by your organization.
• Reassign ownership of team resources (Templates, Library Files, and Courses). This enables ownership to be passed if, for instance, a coach is leaving the organization or changing roles.

Group Management

• Administer team Groups.  This allows an individual to set up coaching Groups in the organization, building groups by pairing coach (or coaches) with one or more [client] group members.  Being able to manage team Groups doesn’t necessarily mean being able to see the actual coaching work that is done within the group (see the next permission).
• View all Group happenings.  This allows an individual to actually see into the group coaching work done within all groups in the organization.  This is meant to enable highly transparent oversight into the coaching, and is meant for, say, a senior coach who wishes to oversee group work being done by other coaches.

Brand Management

• Manage team branding, email templates.  This allows an individual to control core team settings: the branding (including email templates, logo and other branding settings), as well as default templates for system emails that are sent to clients on behalf of coaches (action alerts, appointment reminders, etc.).  This is an important administrative role but is mostly a one time, initial setup (and thus often done by the account owner).

Client Management

• Add and manage team clients.  A rather central administrative role, this allows an individual to set up new clients, as well as deactivate or reactivate existing ones.  Someone who manages the intake and setup of new clients would need this permission.
• Delete team clients. While the add/manage permission allows an individual to deactivate or reactivate a client, this one allows for actual deletion. Deleted client accounts can’t be recovered.
• Manage coach/client pairings.  This enables an individual to manage how coaches are paired up with clients.  This permission very often goes with the previous two.

Super Powers

• See and manage Worksheets assigned by other coaches. This permission is specific to just Worksheets. You can allow a team member to see only Worksheets that have been assigned by other coaches – meaning that team member cannot see Actions, Metrics, etc. that have been assigned by others. The permission below allows a more blanket view into interactions other coaches may have with a given client.
• View all client happenings, even if not specifically paired.  This enables an individual to view the coaching happenings with every client within the organization.  This is meant to enable highly transparent oversight into the coaching, and is meant for, say, a senior coach who wishes to oversee individual work being done by other coaches.  This permission is equivalent to giving “View Only” access on all clients for the coach/client pairing.
• Do coaching stuff with all clients, even if not specifically paired. This is equivalent to giving Coaching access on all clients for the coach/client pairing. Generally reserved for, again, a senior coach type or perhaps a floater type if you have one.  This can also be handy for an administrative role charged with doing common setup tasks for new clients.
• Manage team members.  This enables an individual to set up new coaches and admin members within your account, manage their permissions, and deactivate, reactivate, and delete existing ones.
• Manage team administrative privileges.  The most powerful permission, this enables an individual to grant administrative privileges to other team members (including themselves).  Having this permission automatically implies being able to Manage team members.

There’s just one higher level of privilege that any given user can have, and that is being the account owner.  The account owner is whomever originally set up the account, and these following special rules apply:

• Only the account owner can change the subscription plan, enter in payment information for the account subscription, and cancel the account (basically, all of the account-specific stuff found on the My Account page appears ONLY for the account owner).
• No one else is allowed to mess with the account owner: no deleting, no deactivating, no changing their permissions.
• The account owner can’t un-grant him or herself the Manage team administrative privileges.  In other words, they’re all powerful within their own account whether they like it or not. :)

And that’s Permissions.

Ultimately the configuration of users and roles within a Team Edition account amounts to who’s coaching who plus a bunch of check boxes saying what a given member of your team can and can’t do.

Through Permissions and Pairing you’re able to set up all kinds of roles within your organization, letting your people do and see exactly what they need to.  If you have a specific role that you can’t seem to setup using this system of settings, let me know!

Here’s a screen cast walk through of using Form-based Worksheets within CoachAccountable, including:

• The difference between form-based Worksheets and regular ones.
• How to create form-based Worksheets.
• The work flow of assigning your Worksheets to clients and their experience of completing them.
• Incorporating Worksheets as regular pre-assignments for your appointments.
• Piping Worksheet answers into Metrics.
• Using Courses to deliver recurring worksheet assignments.

At 32 minutes long it goes in depth, and because it goes at a leisurely pace is very easy to follow.

Enjoy!

I wrote earlier about why Metrics are awesome.  Now I’m going to go into the more nuanced version of why Metrics are so powerful when used as part of group coaching.

In other words, why Group Metrics are awesome.

Group Metrics are when you’ve got a coaching group in which all members (or some, you can have individuals sit excluded as appropriate) are working at the same Metric.  Examples include:

• A group fitness program in which members are each tracking their weight and or daily exercise.
• A sales team in which all members are pulling towards an office-wide sales goal.
• A real estate team concerned with tracking performance measures such as number of appointments, showings, and touch points.

In each of these cases, individuals each have their own numbers to report for a given Metric, which in turn contribute to the collective performance of the group.  That group performance is calculated as either the sum or the average of all of the individuals.

A CoachAccountable Group Metric enables you to manage that this detailed tracking gets done, see overall performance as it unfolds, and optionally enable the group participants themselves a transparent view into group performance, or even the individual performance of other group members.

Let’s look at a few examples in turn, to examine the ways by which this can enrich group coaching and foster higher engagement & performance.

Regular Exercise

Say a fitness program challenges its participants to exercise regularly during the week, 3 times at least.  Let’s set this up as a Group Metric (Groups >> select a group >> Group Stream >> + Button >> + Metric) :

Just like setting up an individual Metric, but with a few extra settings.

Note that I opted to include all members of the Group, and the unit of measure is days, as in “how many days did you exercise this week”.  Say this is a six-week program, so we’ll have this span six weeks.  As you can see in the Frequency setting, we’ll have folks report weekly on Fridays.  We’re NOT doing a running total (see the Data entry setting), and accordingly our target will begin at 3 and end at 3.  In other words: in the first week as in the last, exercising 3 times per week is the goal, and more is better.

Beyond group inclusion, there are two other group-specific settings here: we’re choosing to group the data as an average so we can see how the group is overall stacking up against the 3-times-per-week goal, and we’ve set client visibility to include aggregate plus individual performance, meaning they’ll be able to see that group average as numbers get reported, as well as peek into everyone else’s graph.  (A key part of this is that group members know that everyone else can look into their graph–that can have interesting side effects, more on that later.)

Clicking the down arrow in the lower right reveals a slew of blank individual Metrics. I posted a little comment to set the tone.

Group Metrics work how you think they would: as group members report their numbers over the passage of time, the Group Metric average is automatically calculated to show the updated state of things, visible at any time to you and your client group members.

After a few weeks of tracking real data, here’s how things look:

Anthony was bringing the average down, until he got into it.

Think about having this sort of data organized like this as coach: you know exactly who’s thriving and who’s struggling, and can give meaningful and insightful coaching to both the group and specific individuals because of it.  The at-a-glance comparison among group members also gives you an immediate sense how feasible (or not!) a given target really is, allowing you to tune accordingly when needed (after all, if EVERYONE’s in the red zone…).

A Shared Sales Goal

Say a sales team wants to collectively cause $100,000 in sales over the course of a month.  Let’s set that up.

We’ve chosen to group the data as the sum of individual data points, and so here we have to do a little math: since there are four members of the group, each should have an individual target of $25,000 in order to have a group total goal of $100,000.  I’ve set the reporting frequency to be every weekday to prompt the group members to report on each business day.  Under Data entry I’ve chosen the cumulative option, as this is a matter of daily reported sales numbers each contributing to a running total for the month.

Here’s how this could play out after a few weeks:

Tobias was dragging things down for sure.

The summed performance of the group can be seen at the top: at-a-glance you can see that the group is on track to make the overall goal.  Data points can also be conveniently seen for each individual: Anthony stands out as having really excelled relative to his individual goal, and Tobias can be seen easily as being way under.  (Better yet: in practice you as coach would be able to detect this almost immediately, and have the opportunity to intervene and/or offer support way sooner than 3 weeks in.)

You have the option of whether or not to make all individual performance visible to all other group members.  While not always appropriate, this can be a great way to cause a useful sort of peer pressure to perform: everyone knows their own numbers are subject to scrutiny by other group members.  In the best case this can create a very healthy sort of pissing contest among participants, spurring on a sort of one-upping that elevates the group as a whole.

Tiny Habits

A Group Metric can be an effective way to instill a useful practice into your coaching groups.  Say for example you’d like all of your group member to, for the next 3 weeks, take on the practice of meditating daily.

Here’s the setup:

Tracking a regular practice is a good candidate for a Binary Metric, wherein the measurement is simply a “did you do it or didn’t you”, a one or a zero.

Here’s how the Metric looks two weeks in:

Huh, is Tobias Canadian?  You probably won’t have that kind of trolling among your group members, but you never know. Could be fun.

As with other Metrics that have a target, what’s powerful about a Group Metric is that no one wants to be the one with lots of red on their graph.  It’s a subtle (but effective!) nudge to keep members keeping up.

Group Metrics accommodate a wide variety of group performance scenarios, and devising useful things to track among groups is open to a lot of creativity.  To summarize, these are the key benefits to using them:

• Manage performance of the whole team thanks to detailed awareness of what’s going on with everyone.
• See the aggregate performance of the whole team, always calculated for you up-to-date.
• Transparency among group members of the collective (and optionally, individual) performance which pulls for individual accountability.

If you’re doing group coaching, give Group Metrics a try: you might be surprised at how much more engaged your clients become when the results are shared and visible in this way.

I’d never heard of Zapier until someone asked if CA integrated with it.  There is a veritable sea of other apps I might make CA integrate with, quite impractical to do them all and certainly not to be done in response to only one request, and so I tucked the idea away for the time being.

And then eventually I got another request.  And then another.  And then several more.

By about the third person to ask I gave it a good look and very much liked the premise: integrating with Zapier, it turns out, is not so much integrating with one app, but rather is a gateway to near-effortless integrations with a whole ecosystem of other apps.

Zapier makes it possible for your average person (specifically, NON-programmers) to make two different apps to talk to one another in order to accomplish certain tasks of automation, and with no programming necessary.  These include tasks of the form “when X happens over here, make it do Y over there”, like for example “When someone schedules an appointment with me from my WuFoo form, add it as an event to my Google Calendar.”

With the CoachAccountable API, CA is ripe for being one of the apps that can be integrated with others via Zapier.  I hadn’t yet made it a priority as of this past week, until just the other day I got another request for it, this time via chat from one Louise Beattie of Working a Better Life.

“Hey, since I’ve got you here, would you mind telling me specifically what you would use it for?” I asked.  She said she’d like to have it so that clients she added to CoachAccountable would be automatically added to her mailing list within ActiveCampaign.

Hmmm… “Are you going to be online for a little while?  I’d be happy to cook that up for you if you’d be willing to be my guinea pig on this, and let me know how it was working for you.”  I explained more or less how I myself wasn’t a Zapier user and so somewhat flying blind about the whole thing.  She was game.

So it was then that I spent some time putting the finishing touches on some toying around I’d done earlier, motivated by being able to serve a real and specifically requested use case.  Fun!

Even in this super early phase, this totally works, and is one of many MANY possible tasks that could be setup.

Louise was offline by the time I had things ready to go (being 7 hours ahead of me in the UK I suppose I might’ve suspected that) but the next day I’d got confirmation that the setup was a working success.

CoachAccountable as a Zapier app is now in invite-only mode.  Again, flying blind as I am (and more to the point, not myself chomping at the bit with specific integration needs), I’m leaving it up to users of both Zapier & CoachAccountable to guide in what would be useful, and the functionality of what can be easily setup via Zapier will grow and evolve in accordance with requests.

For example, two weeks ago another coach said this:

I’d love to have some rules fire when a new coaching client is added. Like connecting on LinkedIn, Facebook, maybe tie it in to a service that ships a card or brownies.

Automated brownie sending to new clients–nice!  I take it as proof positive that there’s a lot of room for creative ideas in this space.

If you’re a Zapier user and would like to link your CoachAccountable account to it for whatever purposes of automation with other systems you use, you can!  You’ll not find CA in the Zapier app directory yet, but you can connect it via this invite link:

https://zapier.com/developer/invite/29519/b40a6c79d29336524e270178ecba2252/

My thanks to Louise for being the well-timed push that got me finally really rolling on this front!

• Yay!!!!! :-) THANK YOU! :-)
• My clients have been asking for this for years. It looks great, you’re a champ! :)
• Lovin it so far!
• LOVE IT! CONGRATULATIONS! I can’t wait to dig deeper but it looks great!

Thus were the communications sent to me from the community of CA users within the first 6 minutes of my announcement that CA Mobile was ready to go.

Indeed this one’s been wanted for a while.  CoachAccountable has worked from day 1 on smartphones so I deliberately let a mobile version slide as a priority.  Having a second, complimentary version entails substantial overhead to maintaining and evolving the system, and so it was net quite useful to not have that while I grew CA in other ways, ways that made more fundamental expansions to what CA was capable of.

(That, and dragging my feet on this front has meant a much improved “least common denominator” of device that I needed to support over what it would have been a year or two ago, making the released product both nicer and easier to build & maintain.)

But I’ll grant that pinching and zooming about is clunky, especially when all you want to do is mark an Action complete or report on a Metric.  And since we coaches traffic heavily in the realm of getting folks to do that which they weren’t about to do of their own accord, ANYTHING that reduces barriers to acting on our coaching is bound to be a win.

Thus CA Mobile’s time has come.  Let’s take a look!

When you log in as coach you’ll first see a listing of your clients along with a summary of what’s new:

(The “Appointments Outlook” button takes you to a succinct listing of all of your upcoming appointments in the system, as well as any pending requests for you to accept or decline.)

Tapping on a client takes you to their respective client page, wherein you see a detailed listing of what’s new and recent, broken into sections:

Tap on any section to be brought to greater detail of that section.  See for example Actions:

Most items in a listing (for example the listing of Actions seen above) can be swiped to reveal controls: swiping right reveals buttons for common commands that can be done (like unmarking an Action done, or deleting it).  Swiping left reveals a button by which to view comments on a given item (for those items that support it, like Actions, Worksheets, etc.).

Here’s what Metrics look like:

Since hovering doesn’t apply on mobile, you tap a given data point to see the details and any comment.  Tap again to hid it.  If the graph is looking to squished on your upright device, rotating it 90 degrees will have it expand to fill the additional horizontal space.

For this initial release, CA Mobile allows your clients to do pretty much everything they’re allowed to do, and for you as coach to do pretty much everything you can do with client, like making action plans, scheduling appointments and assigning worksheets.  (Heck, though I don’t recommend it, you can even create new form-based worksheets from within CA Mobile!)

(Let’s be clear: this is a squashed mess here, so I say edit complex worksheets on your smartphone at your own peril!  Tip: to edit a form input in a worksheet, do a double tap on it, and if that doesn’t work, a touch hold for one second will.)

Here’s the My Account page, which allows you and your clients to update personal info, including your head shot (no excuses now for your clients to not upload their own, given doing so can be as simple as taking a selfie on their smartphone camera):

And finally the logout screen, which in addition to letting you log out gives you the option to switch to any other accounts you may have linked within CA (assuming there are any), and a button to jump you back to the desktop version of CA for whatever reason (nice if you need to do anything that’s not yet supported by CA Mobile).

I’ll grant grouping all of these things together is a fairly loose take on what the phrase “log out” means, but really this is all the stuff of jumping out of one context and into another.

Getting in to CA Mobile

Accessing CA Mobile is as simple as logging in from the regular login screen a smaller device.  When CA detects you logging in from a device that would probably prefer to show CA Mobile, it’ll redirect you accordingly.  (This works the same for your clients.)

It’ll also remember the preference for a given device so that if, say, you or your client click a link into CA from your email you’ll go to the right place, desktop or mobile.  What if CA puts you in the desktop version and you’d rather be in mobile?  You’ll find at the very bottom when logged in a little link to “Go mobile friendly” in all cases, and a bigger one towards the top right when viewing CA on a smaller screen.

And if you’re in CA Mobile and want to jump back to the desktop mode?  Again, that’s always as simple as bringing up the “Log Out” screen and tapping the “Go to the desktop version” button there.

White Labeling and CA Mobile

One of the fun things about CA Mobile is that it can be made to be very “appy”, in that as a White Label branding user you can set an app icon.

App icons are the spiffy little square images that becomes the icon when you do the whole “add to home screen” thing for a given website on your mobile device. Since your clients will probably enjoy to have a home screen shortcut to CA Mobile on their smartphones, it’ll be quite slick indeed to have your branded app be what shows up.

You can set this up by going to your white label branding settings page within CA and finding the new “Custom App Icon” section within.

CA has a nice default icon for a home page app on a smartphone, but it’s kinda fun to have it be your own.  Compare the default versus a custom:

Your custom app logo will probably be more intentionally designed, and the name of your app doesn’t even HAVE to be a witty pun on “CoachAccountable”.

Another perk of White Labeling in this new mobile-friendly era for CA is that the standard login page (which has been remixed to be look and work great on screens of any size) will brand itself according to the white label settings of the account last logged into, meaning that login page can serve nicely as the one your clients regularly visit (you might want to change your Login URL setting to “https://www.coachaccountable.com/login” to take advantage!).

To wit, after being logged into an account with Couch Reclinable, this is what the login screen looks like:

Looking Ahead

So far CA Mobile is a hit with users who’ve tried it.

Groups, Billing, Courses, and Team Dashboard are yet to come, but what’s in place already should be the 90% solution for the regular interactions with CA done by you and your clients.

I’d like to wrap up by sharing the words of one Michael Leahy.  I give his words on this matter a certain special credence, for he has been one of the staunchest demanders of there being a mobile-friendly CA for now nearly two years (so much so that when my wife and I made a bet of whether or not I would have CA Mobile done by 4th quarter 2015, we set his approval as the threshold of sufficient completion).

One hour and 20 minutes into CA Mobile’s release Michael wrote:

John, so far, all I can say is AWESOME!!! I’m really loving’ this!

So I haven’t really spent a lot of time on it yet, and only on my iPhone. Can’t wait to try it out on my iPad. I may never access CA on my laptop again (except for the obvious stuff where I’m doing a lot of document creation or course creation).

…

You’ve far exceeded my expectations! I can’t wait until I see what you come up with re- Groups, Courses, and Team Dashboard.  Again, let me just say in closing that you’ve really blown me out of the water with this new CA Mobile. Exceptional job!!!

With that I’m given hope that CA Mobile was worth the wait.

I’m looking forward to rounding out CA Mobile with the missing parts, and I thank everyone both for their patience with the process as well as their excitement for the result.

Here’s to giving our clients an exceptional experience of being coached by us.