FLG Business Technology

This morning FLG 360 has been updated.  Along with some bug fixes, several minor new features have been introduced:

• Hover over the lead ID on the search leads screen to see a pop up box with more information about the lead including phone numbers, email, introducer and referral details.  Click the link to view the lead summary.
• There’s now a ‘Search Leads’ link in the top right hand corner of the lead summary/details screens.  Use this to either return to search leads if that’s how you got to the lead (your last search will reload for you), or go to search leads to start a new search.
• When viewing an reply email or inbound text message, the ‘Go To Lead Summary’ button has now been replaced by a link in the top right hand corner.  (This link only appears if the item is accessed from the homepage).
• A new ‘export’ option is available for downloading partner details.  Click ‘Partners > Details’ and then click the ‘Export’ button at the bottom of the page.  A download will start with a CSV (comma separated values) file containing a list of partners.
• There are now separate options for giving a user permission to view/edit the cost, value and billing point of a lead.

If you don’t use FLG 360 for CRM or lead management in your business, take a look at the features.

Until now, when creating a task for yourself or another user, the new task could conflict with existing tasks around the same time.

This evening, a new feature has been introduced that will alert you of any other potentially conflicting tasks.  Details of this and other updates are shown below.

• Task Conflicts – When a task is being created/edited, other tasks within 15 minutes before or after the due time for the task being created/edited are now flagged up to the user.  The user can then schedule the task more appropriately if necessary.  When assigning a task to another user, for privacy reasons only the times of the conflicting task(s) are shown, rather than the full task details.
• Permissions & Preferences – Changes to permissions and preferences (user or account level) now come into effect immediately rather than when the user next signs in.
• Message Received Notifications – For users who don’t sign in to their account often, it’s now possible to get an email notification when a message arrives into their account.  To enable this option, visit ‘Settings > Users > Edit’ and tick the ‘Send Email Notifications When a new email or text message is received’ option.
• Date & Time Formats – To improve consistency, all dates/times are displayed in the format ‘Tue, 19th Jan 2010 18:00′, or a subset of this.  Times in the 12 hour format have been dropped.

If you don’t use FLG 360 CRM, you can test drive the service for free.  The plans and pricing page has also recently been made clearer.

The text editor within FLG 360 (used when writing emails or creating templates) has been updated.  It’s faster, has a better interface, and now includes a ‘spell check as you type’ spell checker which will underline mis-spellings in red in the same way as MS Word and other word processors do.  Click the ‘ABC’ icon on the toolbar within the text editor to change settings.

If you use FLG 360, you’ll know that most of the action centres around ‘Tasks’.  When a task is due or a message is waiting to be read, a notification shows in the top right of the display to notify the user.  The user can then click the notification to go to the lead summary or the message.

From this week, a new ‘Upcoming Tasks’ feature has been released which presents the user with a pop-up box of the next 5 upcoming tasks/unread messages so the user can choose which to deal with next.

To see Upcoming Tasks, click the link in the top right corner of the display if you have at least 1 task or unread message.

An update this morning has introduced these new features and improvements:

• Tasks (on both the homepage and lead summary) now include ‘defer’ quick links to defer the due date/time by 1 hour, 2 hours, 1 day, 2 days, or a week in 1 click:
  

  Defer Tasks with a Single Click

• A new ‘Copy Lead’ option has been added to the actions available on a lead.
• When adding new leads through ‘New Lead’ or ‘Import Leads’, there is now the option to override duplication settings and save the lead even if a duplicate is found.
  • On ‘New Lead’, the duplicate message now contains the option to either create the lead anyway or to go to ‘Search Leads’ to find the existing lead.
  • In ‘Import Leads’, there is now an option on step 3 to ‘Ignore De-Duplication Settings’.  If this option is ticked, leads will be imported even if duplicates are found.

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.

If you’re a Website design, hosting or telecoms business, you can resell FLG 360 under your own brand for profit.

Perhaps you have clients that currently receive leads directly into their email inbox, print out and manually distribute? You know ‘full’ CRM will be too steep a learning curve and too complex, but there is a need for better lead management.

By reselling FLG 360 you can solve your client’s lead management problems, and start building up a regular income stream that falls straight to your bottom line.

• Fully own branded
• Accessed from your domain
• Unlimited single user Team plans for free!
• Heavily discounted reseller pricing
• Easy for your clients to use
• Fast deployment
• Upsell opportunities

Find out more about reselling FLG 360 or place an enquiry.

An update has been applied to 360 this morning, enabling the following new features:

- New ‘Master Password’ facility to allow administrators to sign-in to any user/partner account with a single password.
- New ‘Contact Permissions’ section within ‘Edit Lead’ to mark a lead as do not call, do not fax or do not email. A label will appear next to the phone/fax or email address if the DNC status is known.
- Search Leads list has been re-organised and now displays company name if it exists. The line displaying phone number/email address has now been replaced to show the assigned user. Phone number and email address still available by clicking ‘Print View’.
- New layout for the ‘Edit Lead’ screen, plus links to edit directly from the lead details tab.
- Additional fields of type long text (for a larger text box to take paragraphs of text), phone, email, postcode and date now available.
- Many ‘behind the scenes’ changes to improve speed.

If your business doesn’t already use FLG 360, improve your lead management today with a free test drive.

We’ve added a ‘Quick Search’ box to the top right hand corner of every screen – just type in a name or lead ID to go straight to the Search Leads screen to see all matching leads.

Also new to the top corner is a notification for emails or due soon/overdue tasks. Whenever an email is waiting, or when a task needs attending to, just click the link to go straight into the email or related lead. This also serves as a quicker way to go through many overdue tasks, rather than navigating back to the homepage to pick up each task, just click the link to jump to the next job.

Also in this update, there’s now a ‘Done’ link on each task/email on the homepage, and the old ‘View’ link on emails (which took you to the lead summary screen) has been replaced with a ‘Read’ link which jumps straight into the email.

Free 14-day test drives of FLG 360 have been available for a while now, but now test drives are activated instantly.

Once the test driver has completed a short form on the 360 site, and chosen a plan, number of users and hostname, an email will be sent almost immediately with sign-in details.  The test drive is then available for the full 14 days.

Take a free test drive of 360 Lead Management now.