FLG Business Technology

You may have noticed some changes to 360 this morning following an update, particularly a new ‘Update Leads’ option on the ‘Tools’ menu.  Here’s what’s changed with the latest update:

• Improvements to the API. It is now possible for other business systems to update a lead within 360 automatically (through an XML post to the API).
• New Update Leads tool. For some time it’s been possible to import leads from a CSV file.  Now leads can be updated from a CSV file.  To use this tool, export a CSV file using ‘Search Leads’, make changes to it as necessary (most fields can be updated including assigned user and status, but excluding lead group, introducer and site), and then upload the updated file into ‘Update Leads’  The process is then very similar to importing new leads.  This tool will be very useful for processing spreadsheets sent back from partners.
• Formatting lead data. Up until now, the system would try to ‘clean’ the data on new leads so that forms filled out in ‘ALL CAPS’ or ‘all lower case’ would be converted to ‘Title Case’.  However, this meant that names properly entered as ‘Mr. McKay’ or ‘Mr. FitzGerald’ were converted to ‘Mr. Mckay’ or ‘Mr. Fitzgerald’.  This feature has been improved, but in order to reach a compromise between amending data and preserving correct formatting, forms filled out in all upper case won’t be converted.

Several smaller improvements and bug fixes have also been applied.  If you don’t already use FLG 360 to manage your business sales leads, take a look at the features and pricing, or take a test drive.

An update last night improved the way that leads are imported and bulk actions are processed:

• The import limit (1000 leads) and the bulk actions limit (1000 leads) have now been lifted, and you can now import as many leads as necessary in 1 batch (10MB file limit), or apply bulk actions to as many leads as you can search for.
• You will now see a ‘Processing..’ page until requests are complete, and requests are processed in the background.  This means you may wait longer for the request to be complete, but you can navigate away from the ‘Processing..’ page and the request will continue in the background.

I hope this makes your life a bit easier!

A lead import tool has been available for some time, but although it worked perfectly well, it wasn’t very flexible and required data to be in a certain format.  Yesterday, along with some other smaller updates, a new lead import tool was released.

Here’s the improvements released yesterday:

• New lead import tool providing much more flexibility.  The data format can be adjusted so that the CSV/XML data is parsed correctly, and more importantly, there is now a ‘column mapping’ feature.  This means you can import a file with any (or even no) column headers, and map the columns to the data they contain.  The column type will also be auto-detected if a recognised column header is provided, such as ‘phone’.
• UI improvements within ‘Edit Lead Type’ and ‘Edit Contact Bots’ to make managing filters/actions a little quicker and easier.
• Lead Group additional fields are now locked for editing if there are leads in the lead group, or there are filters on any of the lead types within the lead group.  This is to prevent changing the order or type of data in each field, which would cause the data on a lead to be mixed up or filters to work incorrectly.  You can ‘unlock’ the fields if you need to, but I wouldn’t advise this.
• There is now a ‘Sequential’ group distribution method.  By choosing this (in ‘Settings > User Groups > Edit’), leads/tasks that are assigned to a group are assigned sequentially (round robin) rather than randomly.
• Some database optimisations should mean that working with lists of leads works a lot quicker.

360 has been updated with these improvements:

• A long awaited delete partner feature!  Access this from ‘Partner > Details’, you’ll see the new ‘Delete’ link next to the ‘Partner Status’ drop-down box.
• When you download a CSV of leads (as an internal user rather than partner), you’ll see a new ‘LastNote’ column.  This contains details of the last note added to the lead, if one exists.
• New reports are available to get a list of leads ordered by the date the lead was first marked as qualified or converted.  So for example, you can get a list of all leads that John Smith converted in the past week.

See our website to learn about how FLG 360 can help you to run your Lead Generation business.

Along with today’s launch of the lead actions feature, there’s a few smaller updates by popular request:

• ‘Remember Me’ option on sign-in.  Up until now, a user needed to sign-in every time they restarted their browser.  Now, by ticking the ‘Remember Me’ box when signing in, the user will stay signed-in for 20 days, even when the browser is closed down.  360 must have been the only application on the net not to have this option -  but all is fixed now!
• Templates are ordered by both type (email, SMS, letter), and now lead group on the ‘Manage Templates’ screen.
• New ‘Copy’ option on the ‘Manage Lead Types’ screen for fast duplication of lead types.
• When partners send a message through the ‘Send Message’ option within the partner portal, if the message relates to a particular lead and that lead is assigned to a user, the message is registered as a task rather than emailed to the nominated notification user.
• Improved CSV import tool.

Documentation is an area that I’m the first to admit we can improve on massively, but thankfully 360 is fairly easy to use.  However, up until now we didn’t have detailed technical guides for XML lead capture, XML lead output and importing leads.

From today, we do.  They’re available throughout the interface (where relevant) as PDF downloads.  A CSV template file for importing leads is also available under ‘Import Leads’.

There is also a guide available under ‘Manage Templates’ that explains how to include a range of over 100 variables into email, SMS and letter templates.