March 20, 2023

💌 Customers can leave formatting notes on notices!

We’ve given you and your customers the option to leave notes on notices that might be a little bit more high-maintenance, aka require more complex formatting. That way, if it’s too tricky for your customers to use our text editor to format their larger files, they can still communicate with you via Column about how their notice should be handled. For now, notes are only available for notices submitted without formatting — check the Help Center to learn more about this flow.

🏡 Making customers feel at home in Column, right away.

It used to be that when you uploaded notices on behalf of certain customers, they were automatically registered in Column as individuals. They didn’t get the chance to join organizations, even if their colleagues were already part of organizations on Column. Now, these customers will have the option to join their existing organization from the get-go, so they can access the right affidavits, invoices, and shared notice history right away. Or, if they’re the first to the party, these customers can create a new organization and invite new members to join.

🪶 Notices of a feather can now folder together.

We heard from you that it was difficult to organize your notices after you downloaded them from Column. Now, when you download your notices into a folder from Column, you can choose to group them in folders by notice type! Yep — your pagination process just sped up a notch. This update applies for publishers with custom notice types who download notices manually from Column.

January 6, 2023

New Year, Better Column, Better Customer Experience

It’s even easier for your advertisers to join Column!

Now, when advertisers sign up for Column, they can search for their organization (if it’s already in Column) and request to join it. This is perfect for advertisers who work for law firms, governments, or other organizations. Before this feature, some advertisers didn’t know that their colleagues had already placed notices through Column when they created their accounts. This led to duplicate accounts and confusion. But now, with our new organization search feature, advertisers can easily join the right account and start placing notices right away. And if their organization isn’t on Column yet, no worries. They can create a new one during the sign-up process. It’s all part of our effort to make the onboarding process as smooth as possible for our advertisers.

We’ve improved your process for placing notices on behalf of your customers.

Now, when you’re uploading notices on behalf of your customers, everything will go a bit smoother. We heard that the way Column auto-filled your customer information was often tricky to use — so we fixed it! Now, when you enter an email address for your customer as you’re placing their notice, Column is going to first check whether the customer has already placed notices in your newspaper. If they have, their information will automatically fill in (and if you still need to edit your customer’s details, you can do so in the Customers page). If the customer is new, just fill in all the contact information you know. Once you submit the notice, you can find the customer in your Customers page.