Online Product Registration a Great Success

Everybody has seen those registration cards that come with most software products. Users are supposed to fill them out and mail them in order to get tech support and be notified of upgrades. Well, sometimes people do and sometimes they don't. (At one time or another, everybody has probably "filed" one or more of those cards some place other than the mailbox.)

As a software company, Seagull obviously has a special interest in having as many customers register as possible. It lets us learn more about users' application environments, makes it easier for us to provide tech support to authorized users, and it simplifies the software upgrade process. Unfortunately, even with free postage, a majority of customers do not bother to send in their registration cards. The percentage of cards received back from our overseas customers was especially low.

The poor card-return rate was a large part of the justification for switching to an online registration system. In addition, however, the thousands of cards that we did receive still had to be manually entered into our computer system by our own people, making a more automated solution even more desirable to us.

We are pleased to say that the project went very well and our extensively-tested online registration system was launched in September 2002 with the release of BarTender 7.0. The results have been well worth the effort! Since the switch to online registration, our registration rate has more than tripled, and our registration rate from overseas is almost as high as our North American registration rate.

BarTender 7.0 (and higher) offers users the option of automatically launching the registration process upon completion of the installation. Alternatively, users can come to our web page at a future time and register then. Whatever they choose, there's no walk to the mail box, or even the need for a pen. Users simply fill in some easy-to-understand web forms on their computer and press "Done."

Online registration has proven to be a win-win proposition, since it not only means less work for our users, but has greatly reduced data entry work for us, including the fact that we don't have to worry about anybody's handwriting or incomplete data. In fact, almost no human intervention is required from us at all. A Seagull technician merely pushes a button to view each newly received registration record, glances at a few fields to make sure that there is no obviously bad data that might have made it past our error-checking filters, and then pushes "save." It's hard to imagine the process being any easier!

We were so encouraged by the success of our web-based registration project and the speed and reliability of the underlying SQL data engine that we used the same database and application development tools for our new online ordering system. (See other article.)