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 append 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.

FLG 360 has been updated earlier today.  This update should clean up the homepage a little, give you a better idea of the lead behind a task/email, and give you easy access to search leads by filter from the top right hand corner of every page.

Pop Up Email/Task Lead Details

So that you can get a better idea of the lead that a task/email relates to, you can now click the title of the email or task on the homepage to see more details.  The ‘defer’ task options have also been moved into this pop up box, and options to prioritise or unprioritise a task are also available.

Here’s a screenshot of the new feature in action:

Pop Up Quick Filter

The ‘Quick Search’ links which used to be found right under the summary on the homepage now appear when you click the ‘filter’ icon at the top right hand corner of every page:

Clicking ‘New Filter Search’ will take you to exactly the same place as when you click ‘Search Leads’ in the left menu.  All other options will open up a search for ‘all time’.

On Friday morning, FLG 360 was updated with these new features & improvements:

• Search Leads is now split into ‘Filter’ search and ‘Keyword’ search.  Look for the link to the right of the ‘Search Leads’ header to change between the two.
• A new tick box selection method has been added to Search Leads which now works with the ‘Bulk Actions’ option to allow sets of leads to be selected.
• Hovering your mouse over the date of each lead will reveal the full date and time.
• More Leadbay lead types are now supported (the full range).
• The link to leads on email notifications now links to the lead summary page rather than the lead detail page.
• Several minor bug fixes.

For those of you that don’t use FLG 360, you should find out more about it and take FLG 360 CRM it for a test drive.

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.

Some very small changes have been made to the interface:

• New leads now show with a purple label within Search Leads, likewise, on the status summary bar at the top of the lead summary, new leads show a purple status.
• On the homepage, and on the drop down status selection on Search Leads, ‘All Valid’ is now labelled ‘All Open’ to better reflect the type of leads in this status (all except New, Invalid or Closed).
• A change has been made to the ROI reports; the ‘Valid’ column previously counted all leads except New, Invalid or Closed, but the column now counts every lead except Invalid leads.

This should hopefully make the interface a bit clearer.

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!

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.

A few new features have been released today.  This time the improvements are a mixed set picked out from the most common customer requests.

• Add Documents to Leads – Click ‘New > Document’ to upload a document to a lead.  System management users can also delete documents.
• Filter Lead Items – The old controls below the list of items associated with a lead has now been replaced with a drop-down box that lets you filter by the types of items you want to see, for example, select ‘View Documents’ to just see a list of documents.
• ‘Task’ and ‘Bot’ Labels in ‘Search Leads’ - These indicate that there is an active task or active bot on the lead.  It will help you to check that all leads in a certain status have some kind of future action set.
• ‘LastNoteDate’ and ‘LastNote’ Fields on Lead Export – The very last note added (and its date and time) now appear in these columns on lead exports.
• Better Bots – Bots can now be set to start from 00:00 on the day that they are started, this means you can now have control on what hour of day things happen.  For example, have a task created in the morning and one in the evening.  There’s also an option to skip Saturdays and Sundays now.  The bots UI has also been improved, and information about running bots is much better.
• Notify Users of Tasks by Email – You’ll see a new ‘Send Email Notifications: When assigned a task by another user’ option.  When tasks are created & assigned, or re-assigned by other users to a user with this option selected, an email will be sent as notification.  This is useful for users who don’t sign in to the system every day.

If you don’t use FLG 360, please take it for a test drive (14 days free, no credit card needed) and you’ll soon see how easy and fun it is to use compared to traditional CRM systems.

Two new features are now available.

Bounce & Failure Handling

To enable, go to ‘Settings > Users’, edit a user, and make sure ‘Receive and allocate email replies and bounces’ is ticked (details of text message failures will always be received).

When an item bounces/fails, a coloured label will show up under the ‘Email’ or ‘Text Message’ heading within the lead’s history.  For emails, you will see either an orange ‘Bounced’ label, or a red ‘Failed’ label.  A bounce indicates a temporary problem.  The bounced email may still be delivered, and certainly there would be a good chance of success emailing the same address again.  A failed email was not delivered and it’s not likely that future emails to the same address would be delivered – i.e. it’s an invalid email address.  Bounces/failures with emails may take up to 10-20 minutes, or more sometimes, to show up.  It’s also important to note that depending on the way some mail servers handle problematic emails, not all failed emails will be flagged as failed.  Not having the failed label doesn’t mean the email was delivered successfully.

For text messages, there is only a failed status.  This will normally show up within seconds of the text message being sent.  Again, no failed label doesn’t mean the text message was delivered successfully, only that the message centre was happy to accept the message.  Failed text messages are usually invalid numbers.

Priority Tasks

Sometimes, you may want to prioritise a task.  It may indicate that an important new lead has been received, or may be for a telephone appointment that must be on time.  You can now set up a prioritised task by ticking the ‘Prioritise’ check box next to the ‘Task Due’ selector when you create/edit a task, or by choosing ‘Priority Task User’ in lead type actions (for setting priority lead notifications).

The behaviour of a prioritised task depends on whether it is due in the future, due soon or overdue:

• Due in the future – a green ‘Priority’ label under the ‘Task’ heading will appear, but the task will appear in the task list in the same order as a regular task.
• Due soon – an amber ‘Priority’ label will appear and the task will jump to the top of the task list to bring your attention to it.
• Overdue – a red label will show, the task will remain at the top of the task list, and it will appear highlighted with a border.

Clicking on the ‘Priority’ label will unprioritise a task.