April 2021 Product Roundup

April might have only given you 30 days, but we gave you 31 new product updates throughout the month. I never loved math, but Siri told me that’s approximately 1.033 updates per day.

Here’s the highlight reel:

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Contact Relationships: Better together 👥

Have better conversations by looping in the people who matter.

Contact Relationships saw a steady stream of updates in April.

Before Contact Relationships, if you were working together with spouses or family members on a deal, you didn’t have a simple way to keep everyone in the loop on communication and appointments. Now you do.

Every call, text and email from each person gets packaged together neatly, with each person’s name clearly labeled in-line. Spend less time juggling threads and more time building stronger relationships.

We spent the month making Contact Relationships easier and faster to use. Now you can: 

• Schedule appointments with Contact Relationships.
• View and add Contact Relationships on the iPhone app.
• Separate a contact who has multiple emails and phone numbers into a contact with Relationships.
• Move and swap Relationships email addresses around quicker.
• See individual conversations with Contact Relationships in separate Inbox threads.
• Personalize your texts and emails by using merge fields to auto-populate the first names of Contact Relationships.
  

Contact Relationships is one of those updates that customers have wanted for a long time. We’re thrilled that it’s almost ready for prime-time. The team’s still polishing it up before the wide-scale release, but we released it as a beta feature, so get in on the early action and test it out. Admin-level users can enable Contact Relationships on the Power-Ups page.

Text template performance score 🏅

Send better texts and start more conversations.

The new text template performance score makes it easier to know which texts get the best response rate.

Now you’ll see a score next to each text template, which gives you a quick glance at how each text stacks up to the industry average.

We cover the nitty-gritty on the score’s calculation in the help doc, but here are three quick tips on how to keep your texts at the top of the class:

• Only send texts to people who have opted-in to receive them.
• The more personalized you can make your texts, the better. Use merge fields to auto-populate your contact’s name, time of day or even the last property they looked at.
• Don’t send a lot of links. Avoid using link shorteners or Google Drive links, which are often used by spammers.

Dialer Cell Bridge option 📲

Make crystal clear calls.

If your internet connection is shaky, you might have trouble with poor quality audio when making calls using the Follow Up Boss Dialer. That’s when the Dialer’s new Cell Bridge option comes into play.

The Cell Bridge option passes your outbound calls through to your cell phone, and the call uses your cell’s connection instead of your internet connection. That way, your Dialer calls made from your computer will have the same reliability and signal strength as all your other calls made from your cell.

Note: This feature requires a Dialer plan. Interested in saving time and dialing right from your CRM? Check out the Dialer now. Give it a spin for free with our 14-day Dialer trial, which you can start on your Billing page inside Follow Up Boss.

Dialer Call From option 📞 🔢

Build instant rapport by calling from a specific local phone number.

Let’s say you’re calling leads who are in a few different locations, and you want to call from a local phone number. The Dialer’s new Call From option lets admin-level users call from any one of your Follow Up Boss phone numbers when dialing out from a computer.

Note: Call From is a Power-Up feature that requires a Pro or Platform plan. 

Android app: send and receive texts with pictures 📸 

A picture is worth a thousand texts.

Sometimes it’s just easier to text your client a picture instead of trying to play wordsmith. With the latest Android app update, now you don’t have to wait until you’re in front of a computer to send and receive picture texts. Snap and share away while on the go.

So far, I've covered 10 updates:

• Six updates to Relationships
• One update to text templates
• Two updates to the Dialer
• And one update to the Android app
  

But earlier I told you we released 31 total updates throughout the month. That leaves us with 21 I haven’t covered yet. 

(For the record, I didn’t need Siri’s help on that one—simple subtraction has always been my strong suit.)

Here’s a lightning round run-down of the rest:

1. New merge field for sender info (email and text)
2. Pixel call-to-action phone number display improvements
3. Option to keep completed calls from auto-closing in Inbox
4. Page load speed and general performance improvements
5. Option to send Action Plan emails through SendGrid subusers
6. Google Calendar sync improvements
7. Text template content updates
8. Webhook improvements around updated and deleted appointments
9. Android mobile call bridge improvements
10. Text compliancy improvements
11. Android network error management improvements
12. Better deliverability of lead alert texts
13. Call quality improvements
14. Call log updates
    

And multiple security updates to: 

15. Automations
16. Calendar
17. Email settings
18. Importing
19. Texting
20. Uploads and attachments
21. Webhooks

Keep an eye on our updates page to stay tuned to our release radar and get future product news in real time.