In Halcyon’s June 2023 Newsletter we discuss the best way to reach out to support. As well as our new google address search for certain fields and a default task feature.

Link to June 2023 Newsletter.

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Read Halcyon’s May 2023 newsletter at the link below! In this issue, we highlight our new OnBoarding tool, some of the many integrations and partners we work with, and an upcoming feature to our Trade Partner Portal.

Link to May 2023 Newsletter.

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Halcyon’s efficiency tools are designed to save you time by eliminating redundancies and the need for multiple programs’ various business tools. Here we will briefly discuss some of our tools and how they can benefit you, your staff, and your business.

Our Notes tool lets you keep case specific notes stored in one easily viewed location, allowing staff to quickly access any necessary case notes. We also give you the ability to notify them immediately of the note if needed (via text, email, or even both)!

Want to notify a family of something? No problem. You can also send a message to anyone outside of your Halcyon organization and can even have a standard message generated to fit any scenario. We’ll store everything in one convenient area for your assigned Halcyon staff to review or add to as needed.

Set up Auto Tasks in Halcyon so when a case is added or a triggering event occurs, your list(s) of to-do’s are automatically pushed out to staff with any required due dates assigned.

Halcyon also lets you set up as many Custom Statuses for your cases as you’d like, letting you organize your case load with as much specificity as you desire.

As with all aspects of Halcyon, our interface and helpful tools are designed to flow seamlessly with your natural business processes. Our easy to use software is intuitive and robust, freeing up your time to spend with what really matters – your families and communities.

Read Halcyon’s April 2023 newsletter at the link below! In this issue, we discuss a new feature of Halcyon’s Trade Partner Portal, benefits of utilizing our credit card partner, and an upcoming upgrade.

Link to April 2023 Newsletter.

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This year during Women’s History Month, The National Funeral Director’s Association has launched a new annual award – The “Inspiration Award” – to acknowledge an exceptional female or non-binary individual in the funeral service or related field. The 2023 Inspiration Award will be conferred at the Professional Women’s Conference in May.

Halcyon is proud to be a woman founded and woman owned company. Since forming in 2002, we are grateful to have witnessed just some of the diverse impacts that women in the funeral service industry have made. We look forward to learning more of current and future inspiring women/non-binary people in our field!

Do you know someone that is pushing the funeral service and industry forward? Nominate them today! More information about the first annual NFDA Inspiration Award can be found on their website following this link. Nominations are due on March 31st.

Read Halcyon’s March 2023 newsletter at the link below! In this issue, we discuss our new calendar features and the power of maintaining your discount reasons.

Link to March 2023 Newsletter.

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Since we launched our company in 2002, it has always been our number one priority at Halcyon to make life — and technology — easier for all of our clients and users.

With decades of experience in the funeral and cremation industry, we understand how tough it is to manage all the details, and we believe that every aspect of your software should be as simple and seamless as possible.

We also know that our software only provides value if your staff can use it effectively in their day-to-day roles — and if it lightens their workload. No concern is too small to us. We always pledge to continue innovating and improving our platform to make sure it serves you — and your team — in the most beneficial way possible.

That’s why we decided to partner with Matthews Aurora™ Funeral Solutions to create an exciting new integration between Halcyon’s state-of-the-art management system and the Matthews Aurora™ Solution Center Catalog.

“We are very excited to be bringing this new tool to our customers to help them run their operations more efficiently and seamlessly at no additional cost to them,” says Sara Gard, President of Halcyon.

With this integration, arrangers now can view, select, customize, and order Matthews Aurora™ products from within our Halcyon software. And even better: All pricing information is kept up to date automatically, so funeral directors never have to worry about sharing an incorrect cost with a family.

Here’s how this integration will work for clients on the Halcyon platform:

• Funeral directors can access the Matthews Aurora™ Solution Center showroom from within Halcyon’s arrangement system.
• The products that the family chooses are added to their contract within Halcyon’s platform.
• With just the click of a button, the funeral director sends the order directly to Matthews Aurora™.

This eliminates the need to log into multiple websites to finish completing an order — or to go through the trouble of calling or faxing another company to place an order.

“This avoids the situation of making a promise you can’t keep to a family when they’re selecting products. You’re able to see the costs and availability of any product in real time instead of having to reach back out to a family later because you’ve told them the wrong price or something was out of stock,” Gard says.

At Halcyon, we are motivated by listening to our clients and learning what their biggest pain points are with all of the processes that happen every day at their businesses — and creating solutions for these issues.

Greg Rollings, the President and CEO of Rollings Funeral Service, says several of his funeral homes have been using this integration for the past few months.

“It makes the selection and ordering process seamless and has surpassed my expectations,” Rollings says.

We are excited to be able to partner with Matthews Aurora™, not only because they are a trusted partner in our industry but also because of the impressive quality of their wide array of products.

“We continue to focus on delivering the finest digital merchandising tools that help our funeral home clients educate families about our products and simplify families’ selection experience. This integration with Halcyon is a great advantage to our joint customers,” says Marty Strohofer, VP of Marketing and Product Development at Matthews Aurora™.

Want to learn more about our software? Request a demo with an expert by emailing demo@halcyondcms.com or by visiting https://www.halcyondcms.com/free-demo/ .

I web conference with many funeral homes and I can tell that many of you need to overhaul your internet connection. Funeral home owners tend to take their computing infrastructure for granted. That is only natural because their focus is needed to serve their families. But your operation depends on the internet more than you might think and now might be to take a look and see if the operation can be more efficient.

A growing number of business applications and appliances require access to the internet. Think about your experience. On your business network right now there are computers, printers, phones, tablets, televisions, watches, cameras and thermostats. Your crematorium’s controller is probably on your local network. It is expected that the average person has 6.5 devices connected to the internet and in 10 years the average person is expected to have 15 connected devices! All these devices are clogging the arteries of your local network. 

An increasing number of services are also now internet-based, including banking, website, email, funeral home management software and cremation management software. Halcyon is 100% web-based (aka cloud-based). There are many tremendous benefits to web-based software.

• Because you don’t install anything your IT labor costs are lowered. You don’t have to maintain local servers or worry about how a computer’s update will affect your software working.
• It is always available. It is true that your internet service could go down right in the middle of an arrangement conference but you have a great backup internet provider – your smartphone!
• Data backups happen for you. This lowers your backup costs but still mitigates data loss.
• It is more secure. This may seem counterintuitive. But that local server of yours is most likely way behind on security patches and is extremely vulnerable to all kinds of cyber threats.

Any decent, truly web-based software uses technologies that make your user experience just as fast or even faster than previous software that you installed locally. For example, there should be very little delay when you interact with your management system. If your management system is slow then either you are using a poor system or your network, specifically your router, could be the problem.

You might be thinking, “but we put in a wireless router”. How long ago was that? There is an Economic Law that says that telecommunication networks double bandwidth every 18 months. This law is driven by demand. Fortunately wireless routers have improved dramatically in speed, bandwidth and in coverage.

Basic Networking Components

You pay someone to bring you internet service. This is your internet service provider (ISP). It is probably a cable company or a telephone company. ISPs are not all the same. Their ability to provide you fast, reliable internet connection is largely based on the wiring methods that company has available from their source all the way to your location. I am not going to dig deep into these but here are just a few factors to consider for your ISP:

• Look for speed. Your provider will offer different packages at different price points. The more devices there are that need to access the network the more speed you will need.
• Look for reliability. Your ISP may not be measuring this and you may have to rely on anecdotal evidence or consumer reviews.
• Generally speaking cable is much faster and more reliable than plain old telephone wiring (aka POTS).
• Make sure your modem and router can handle the speed you are paying the ISP to provide.

Modem means modulator/demodulator. It changes data transfers from one form of electrical pulse to another. Think of it as a transformer between the ISP and the router.

The router is the central device of your local network. It is not unusual to have a modem and router built into the same device. If your modem and router are separate, then the router is wired to the modem. Devices can be either wired to the router or it can be a wireless router. The wireless router is what gives your location a Wi-Fi network for your devices to connect. I am going to focus on wireless routers.

The drawback to Wi-Fi is coverage- the signal only goes so far. The solution for that used to be to buy a wireless extender. Unfortunately with an extender you had to re-log into a different Wi-Fi network when you moved from the main Wi-Fi broadcast to the extender. Most devices don’t handle that very seamlessly.

Mesh networks are the standard now. With a mesh network you will place access points throughout your business. The access points interact with each other and your devices then see this as one huge, Wi-Fi network. Need more coverage, buy another access point. You should invest a few hundred dollars in a mesh network if you haven’t already. Which brand? Here are some things to look for

1. Make sure that the access points do not degrade the speed from the master. One system I know of has slow speeds on their access points so that the ISP maximum is never met.
2. Look for the latest standard (Wi-Fi 6 as of the time this was written).
3. Look for speed.
4. Look for coverage.
5. Look for simplicity to set up.

At this time Cnet likes the latest google offering (Nest Wifi) best. See this link for details: https://www.cnet.com/news/best-mesh-wi-fi-system-2020-eero-google-nest-netgear/

Will I have to do this again? Yes. Remember demand will continue to grow. A good rule of thumb is to reconsider every 3-4 years.

References:

https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/iot/by-2030-each-person-will-own-15-connected-devices-heres-what-that-means-for-your-business-and-content/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-mesh-networking-and-why-it-matters-to-you/

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3212444/mesh-network-explained.html

https://www.cnet.com/news/best-mesh-wi-fi-system-2020-eero-google-nest-netgear/

Although this isn’t your typical blog post, we wanted to acknowledge the great work our friends at MKJ Marketing did for us. We could not be more pleased.

You may be wondering why we did not build our own site. Well, we are certainly capable of creating a site that is on the web, but our expertise is in funeral home and crematory management solutions and not making a great looking site with a stellar marketing message and top-notch SEO. Frankly, our developers are a bunch of engineers and our site would be a series of perfectly aligned boxes preferably of equal size – not that there is anything wrong with that, especially for things like your pantry or your living room furniture layout.

Actually we did create our very first website about 20 years ago and it was a series of perfectly aligned boxes. If you dig hard enough you might be able find a cached version deep in the bowels of the internet. … but please don’t.

Frequently when prospective customers see a demonstration of Halcyon they end up selecting our management software to help manage their business. We hear things like “Where have you been?” or “I’ve been looking for software like this for years”. We have been around almost 20 years! Clearly we were not doing enough to promote ourselves so we engaged the experts at MKJ Marketing to handle our marketing message and website upgrade.

We stayed focused on what we do best which is to continue to add new features and enhancements to our funeral home and crematory management solutions and give you fantastic, responsive technical support when you need it.

If you are an existing customer, we thank you for trusting us. If you are in the market for a management solution, please give us a call or sign up for a demo. We would love to show you how Halcyon can help!