FLG Business Technology

You’ll find an updated version of FLG 360 when you sign in this morning.  Here’s what’s been rolled out:

• Internal Messaging: Use the ‘Send Message’ link under the left hand menu to send a message to a single person or everyone in a group.  Messages will show up at the top of the ‘Tasks & Messages’ list on the user’s homepage.  If you don’t want a user to have the ability to send messages, use the new permissions setting under ‘Other Permissions’ in ‘Settings > Users > Edit’.  By default, this feature is enabled.
• Recently Viewed: You can now click on the ‘Recently Viewed’ link (again, under the left hand menu), to see a list of the last 10 leads that have been viewed since you last signed in.
• Notifications: The notification area at the top right of the screen has been tidied up a little, with a more detailed explanation of what the next item is.  Until now, whether an email or text message reply was waiting, you’d see ‘You Have a Message’.  You’ll now see ‘You Have a Text Message’, etc.. with a more relevant icon.
• Report Totals: On all relevant reports, you’ll now see a total line above the report detail, and you’ll see an extra line at the bottom of many downloaded reports.
• Import Validation: Many users have come across difficulties when Excel removes the 0 from phone numbers.  FLG 360 will now detect when a phone number is missing a 0 and prepend it for you.

If you don’t already use FLG 360, you can find more information and get a 14 day test drive at the FLG 360 website.

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.