FLG Business Technology

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.

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.