It would be really helpful if development (and Trainers) could look at Truancy Call and compare the functionality with Absence Call.
Using Absence Call is such a negative experience. It's not at all intuitive, it's clunky and time consuming to use and very slow when writing back to MIS. Truancy Call was a basic, effective system. It did what it said on the tin with the minimum of fuss. Everything was on one page.
*it doesn't call those with PR (very odd that it calls Priority 1) - not great for those with shared care, those with safeguarding concerns etc.
*you can't easily see whether you have responded to responses from parents / carers and written it back. You can't listen to the message and code it at the same time.
*if you cancel a call it doesn't write back to MIS
*you can't code lessons
*you can't sort the list in absence call alphabetically
The list just goes on.
We were told that Absence Call would simply be a web based version of Truancy Call. I have yet to speak to anybody who has been changed over, that finds it better.
I have already flagged these and more with the migration team, but have no way of telling what enhancements / changes if any are planned. It is very frustrating.
I don't wish to be negative, but am disappointed.
Thank you for such comprehensive feedback, we really do appreciate you taking the time to help us improve our products. After speaking to you directly I've taken some ideas on how to improve the experience if we do similar migration projects in the future, but I'm sorry that it has not been a positive experience for you. I'll reach out to you directly on the specific points we discussed but wanted to add a response here for others who may be following this idea.
Absence Call is a part of the IRIS Reach functionality and was implemented with a consistent design to the rest of IRIS Reach rather than as a separate product, but it's clear that in doing this some of the ease of using a product like Truancy Call was lost. There are a number of small changes we can make to help with this, and there are some changes we have already made (such as having all absence calls in the Student Record, updating reports and expanding statuses).
Most of these changes are already part of our future plans for developing Absence Call, but some will take longer than others due to dependencies on other projects. We'll let you know as soon as any of these changes are ready for release.
On the PR point - if you switch your Reach settings to use PR rather than P1 we will import all PR contacts with equal priority (as if they were all P1) and Absence Call will call the first contact to be imported. This is something we are looking to change but is dependent on some other changes which are ongoing so will take some time. If you wanted to message all contacts about a students absence in the meantime you can do this either by SMS or app message.