FLG Business Technology

We updated FLG 360 last night, rolling out major improvements to bots, lead actions and the options you have for billing your lead buyers and paying your introducers.

Here’s the details of the new features and improvements:

• Improved Bots Features & Interface: Bots have been improved with new ‘Change Status’ and ‘Assign to User’ actions.  You can also now set a task to any user/group rather than just the user assigned to a lead.  The user interface has been standardised with the lead actions interface so adding bot actions and lead type actions works the same way.  As a side note, the feature is now just ‘Bots’ instead of ‘Contact Bots’.

FLG 360 has been updated this morning.  You may need to refresh your browser or clear your cache if you see any strange behaviour.

• You can now let your users ‘pick up’ (pull) leads, as well as distribute to them (push).  Use this new feature to either work brand new leads or re-work leads that have gone into any status.  More details are provided below.
• The notifications area at the top right of the interface now updates in real time.  For example, if you’re writing an email and a new message comes in, you’ll see the notification appear immediately.
• New ‘ROI’ reports set in Reports Centre give an all round view of leads in, cost per lead, total cost, conversions, conversion rate, ROI and profit.  There are 4 new reports.

Setting Up the ‘Pick Up’ Leads Feature

1. First, put the users that you want to be able to pick up leads into a user group (Settings > User Groups), and also check their permissions in ‘Settings > Users > Edit’ to make sure that ‘Enable pick up leads’ is ticked.
2. Go to edit the user group, and within ‘Lead Pick Up Statuses’ click the ‘Select Statuses’ button.
3. Tick all the statuses that you want users to pick up from.  For example, you might want to tick ‘New’ status across all lead groups.
4. That’s it!  When users in the group sign back in again, if there are leads available to pick up, they’ll see a ‘Pick Up Lead’ option next to ‘New Lead’ in the top right hand corner of the interface.  Clicking this link assigns the lead to the user and takes the user straight to the lead.

How Does ‘Pick Up’ Leads Work?

FLG 360 checks whether there are unassigned leads in any of the statuses that you select, within any of the lead groups that the user belongs to.

If any leads are found, the ‘Pick Up Lead’ option is displayed.  This will randomly select an available lead and assign it to the user, therefore removing it from selection.  Every other user’s display will update in real time so if no further leads are available the ‘Pick Up’ option will dissappear until another lead is available.

There are use cases outside of just picking up new leads.  For example, you may want to do a search for all leads that didn’t convert 3 months ago, and use ‘Bulk Actions’ to un-assign those leads and set the status to ‘Due for Revisit’.  If the ‘Due for Revisit’ status is part of a pick leads setup, then your users will be able to start taking those leads and trying to convert them again.

If you are an existing user and need any help with putting this feature into practice, just let us know.

If you’re not an existing user, get a fully working 14 day test drive and try it out!

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.

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.

Ever since release, 360 has been able to refer leads on to business partners depending on the customer’s postcode. This has now been extended to assigning leads to users based on a user’s postcode.

For example, you can have all leads in the London area assigned to a specific user or group of users dealing with London, and all leads from other areas assigned to a separate team.

Also included in this feature release is the ability to associate users to partners, and therefore to assign leads to users based on the partner introducing the lead or the partner being referred the lead. As an example, you may want to assign a particular user to exclusively deal with one introducer’s leads. You can now!

Remember, you can take FLG 360 for a free 14-day test drive without any risk.