FLG Business Technology

A few new features have been released today.  This time the improvements are a mixed set picked out from the most common customer requests.

• Add Documents to Leads – Click ‘New > Document’ to upload a document to a lead.  System management users can also delete documents.
• Filter Lead Items – The old controls below the list of items associated with a lead has now been replaced with a drop-down box that lets you filter by the types of items you want to see, for example, select ‘View Documents’ to just see a list of documents.
• ‘Task’ and ‘Bot’ Labels in ‘Search Leads’ - These indicate that there is an active task or active bot on the lead.  It will help you to check that all leads in a certain status have some kind of future action set.
• ‘LastNoteDate’ and ‘LastNote’ Fields on Lead Export – The very last note added (and its date and time) now appear in these columns on lead exports.
• Better Bots – Bots can now be set to start from 00:00 on the day that they are started, this means you can now have control on what hour of day things happen.  For example, have a task created in the morning and one in the evening.  There’s also an option to skip Saturdays and Sundays now.  The bots UI has also been improved, and information about running bots is much better.
• Notify Users of Tasks by Email – You’ll see a new ‘Send Email Notifications: When assigned a task by another user’ option.  When tasks are created & assigned, or re-assigned by other users to a user with this option selected, an email will be sent as notification.  This is useful for users who don’t sign in to the system every day.

If you don’t use FLG 360, please take it for a test drive (14 days free, no credit card needed) and you’ll soon see how easy and fun it is to use compared to traditional CRM systems.

Two new features are now available.

Bounce & Failure Handling

To enable, go to ‘Settings > Users’, edit a user, and make sure ‘Receive and allocate email replies and bounces’ is ticked (details of text message failures will always be received).

When an item bounces/fails, a coloured label will show up under the ‘Email’ or ‘Text Message’ heading within the lead’s history.  For emails, you will see either an orange ‘Bounced’ label, or a red ‘Failed’ label.  A bounce indicates a temporary problem.  The bounced email may still be delivered, and certainly there would be a good chance of success emailing the same address again.  A failed email was not delivered and it’s not likely that future emails to the same address would be delivered – i.e. it’s an invalid email address.  Bounces/failures with emails may take up to 10-20 minutes, or more sometimes, to show up.  It’s also important to note that depending on the way some mail servers handle problematic emails, not all failed emails will be flagged as failed.  Not having the failed label doesn’t mean the email was delivered successfully.

For text messages, there is only a failed status.  This will normally show up within seconds of the text message being sent.  Again, no failed label doesn’t mean the text message was delivered successfully, only that the message centre was happy to accept the message.  Failed text messages are usually invalid numbers.

Priority Tasks

Sometimes, you may want to prioritise a task.  It may indicate that an important new lead has been received, or may be for a telephone appointment that must be on time.  You can now set up a prioritised task by ticking the ‘Prioritise’ check box next to the ‘Task Due’ selector when you create/edit a task, or by choosing ‘Priority Task User’ in lead type actions (for setting priority lead notifications).

The behaviour of a prioritised task depends on whether it is due in the future, due soon or overdue:

• Due in the future – a green ‘Priority’ label under the ‘Task’ heading will appear, but the task will appear in the task list in the same order as a regular task.
• Due soon – an amber ‘Priority’ label will appear and the task will jump to the top of the task list to bring your attention to it.
• Overdue – a red label will show, the task will remain at the top of the task list, and it will appear highlighted with a border.

Clicking on the ‘Priority’ label will unprioritise a task.

Prior to today, most reporting was based on the date a lead was originally received.  This caused problems when you needed reports based on the date that a lead was actually sent out to a partner (i.e. referred).  It was possible to get this information from the ‘Status Date (Conversion)’ reports, but this wasn’t ideal.

You’ll now see a ‘Date Referred’ tick box next to the date selection in Search Leads and selected reports within the Reports Centre.  This will bring up the selected leads/report based on the referral date.  The dates shown in the Search Leads list will be the referral date.  Any leads not referred won’t be listed/reported when ‘Date Referred’ is selected.

There’s also a new ‘Partner Transactions Report’ which will give you an exportable list of transactions for a specific period across all partners.  This will be useful when you need to see all transactions for reconciliation, or where you want to find a transaction on a particular date/range.