Update: The government of Vienna and the chamber of commerce announced that they will offer such a system. Since it will most likely for free ... we would have a hard time competing against it. Thus, we stopped development immediately.
Instead of offering our own service, we are publishing our playbook. It should enable everybody to offer such a service with easy. You can use xamoom or any other mobile web portal and in addition, you need a mailbox. That's it.
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The coronavirus is once again presenting the restaurant and catering industry with enormous challenges. In Vienna, Austria, restaurants and bars have to keep attendance lists of their guests. This is a big help for contact tracing – researching people who have been in contact with infected guests. However, the paper chaos brings new problems:
- The lists are often illegible.
- It takes time until they can be typed and processed.
- They can get lost.
- You can write anything on paper – yes, even Snow White or Mickey Mouse.
This mess of paper is the first step. But with the cell phone and xamoom, it can be made really easy.
Due to privacy reasons one sheet of paper for every guest: Here's the sheet from Vienna.
A guest check-in as it should be
Web forms are almost as cumbersome as the paper mess: They are tedious to fill out and there can also be incorrect entries or unintentional typing errors. This renders data worthless.
xamoom has made the corona check-in much easier. Two clicks are enough!
- After scanning the QR code, a mobile website opens. There the user clicks on the check-in banner.
- An e-mail opens that can be sent with a second click.
Click! Click! Done!
On top of that, xamoom is accessible also for people with visual impairment and no app is required. In addition, the check-in page is multilingual and automatically adapts to the device's language settings.
Advantages of the digital check-in
- Great convenience for guests: Since the e-mail client already has the sender's data (name and e-mail address), they do not have to be entered again. The result is a check-in with just two clicks.
- No incorrect entries: The user would first have to enter incorrect data (Snow White or Mickey Mouse) in the configuration of his e-mail client.
- Well informed: On the mobile pages of any pub or restaurant, health authorities could very visibly disseminate current information on the Corona situation. The editorial workflow is simple and efficient.
High efficiency and speed
This method is error-free as the guest data (name, email address, and time) come from the settings of the mobile phone. The timestamp of the email is also digital and cannot be forged.
There are also no hard-to-read lists on paper that first have to be typed (with errors?) into a computer system. This also results in an enormous speed advantage that weighs twice in contact tracing.
What happens after sending?
Instead of the highly-complex backend that we planned, you can have it much easier for your own.
It happens what you expect: E-Mails are going to the mailbox you specified in the mailto link. There you can retrieve the names and email addresses in case the health authorities contact you.
Do not forget to delete the messages after certain days (according to your privacy laws).
Bonus tip: Using a mailto link generator like this one ...
Create powerful mail links with
mailtolinkgenerator.com
... you can create email links that also have a pre-filled subject line or body text.
This way you could also ask your visitors for a newsletter subscription. But be sure that you use double opt-in and do not have any opt-in boxes ticked as on automatically.