June 2020 Product Update

The Follow Up Boss product and engineering teams released some exciting updates in June. There's a new option for managing duplicate leads, some changes to the calling experience, plus a bunch of bug fixes.

Reminder: You can shape Follow Up Boss

As always, we are grateful for all your feedback and support in shaping Follow Up Boss into a first-class experience for you and your team. Do you have an insight or perspective to share? We want to hear from you! There are three easy ways you can share feedback with our team:

• Directly in-app here,
• In our Facebook community, or
• Reach out to our superstar Support team members that are available to help you seven days a week.

Now, without further ado, here's everything we released in June!

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🧍🧍 New lead duplication rules

Most Follow Up Boss users want to avoid duplicate leads in their database, for obvious reasons. We've long designed the system to honor that preference and prevent duplicate leads from existing whenever possible. In conversation with our customer community, however, we kept hearing about a couple of specific times where duplicate leads are actually a good thing.

When are duplicate leads a good thing?

We spoke to a few customers who were very vocal about their need to allow duplicates under specific circumstances. Most of those customers are larger brokerages and teams, but not all--there were a handful of smaller teams who need more control over duplicates as well. But no matter the team size, the same two reasons for allowing duplicates leads into Follow Up Boss came up:

1. When agents pay for their own leads

Suppose your team has agents who fund their own lead buys on Zillow, or run their own Facebook Lead ads. When a lead comes into a campaign that an agent is paying for, they should get it, right? But what if that lead is already in your team's Follow Up Boss database and assigned to a different agent? In that case, most people agree the agent who just paid for that warm lead should get a chance to close it, but Follow Up Boss would simply notify the existing owner.

2. When importing a new agent's contacts

Your team just recruited an all-star agent, and they're bringing a big database with them. They've generated leads for years and enriched their database with diligent follow up, so it's full of information that no one else has. If some of those leads are already in your Follow Up Boss and assigned to another agent, should the new agent's proprietary data be simply added to the existing lead and made available to a different agent? It depends on how your team operates, but for some, the answer is a firm: "No." -- they want to create a separate lead for their new agent.

Introducing agent-owned lead duplication

If either of these situations applies to you, we've got good news: There's a new featured called agent-owned lead duplication that has you covered. It's pretty simple. With agent-owned lead duplication turned on, two things will happen:

• If an incoming lead comes through an agent-owned lead flow, Follow Up Boss will search for an existing contact that came through that lead flow. If one did not come through that lead flow, we will create a new contact even if the contact already exists and is assigned to someone else.
• If you import a CSV file of leads provided by an agent, Follow Up Boss will check to see if each lead is already assigned to the agent who you're importing for. If there is an existing lead assigned to the agent, we will update the contact. If there is an existing lead not assigned to the agent, we will NOT update the existing contact and we will create a new contact assigned to the agent importing.

🚨 It's important to note: by default, Follow Up Boss will still prevent all duplicates. Agent-owned lead duplication will only be activated if you specifically ask for it. To get it, you'll need to email product@followupboss.com and ask our team to turn it on for you. They'll ask a few questions to make sure that it won't cause any unexpected behavior in your account and get you all set up. If The Twilight Zone, The Simpsons, Star Wars and countless others have taught us anything, it's that you can't be too careful when playing with clones 😉

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📲  Easier call transfers

This is one of those small things that should make a common task much easier. When you want to transfer a call in Follow Up Boss, you can now easily search for a specific inbox or member of your team, and if the lead is assigned to an agent, that agent will automatically appear at the top of the user list:

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This should shave a few seconds off of every transfer, and those seconds will add up over time.

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☎️ Mobile call bridge area code matching

When we made switched our mobile calling from your data network over to cellular, you we started asking you to use a "bridge" number. We randomly selected any available number from your country for the bridge, but it turns out that had two issues:

• It's kind of confusing 😐
• For some customers, using an area code outside of your local area code can result in unexpected long distance charges 😡

So, we fixed it 😀 Now, when you place an outbound call, we'll attempt to bridge through a local number that matches your area code, or at least one tied to your state or province. It won't always work (for example, it's basically impossible to get a 212 or 202 area code!), but it should work most of the time.

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🐛 Plus a whole bunch of small fixes

It's not all splashy new features around here. Our team is always fixing bugs and making other minor updates. Here's a rundown:

• There was a bug preventing certain action plans from being marked completed. That's now fixed.
• Some users reported that call transfers weren't showing up on the lead's timeline. Also fixed.
• Call transfer controls were occasionally not appearing for some users. You guessed it: fixed.
• A few improvements were made under the hood to our messaging feature. It's now much faster/smoother.
• Finally, your inbox conversations list should now load and scroll more smoothly. We heard some of you tell us that the scroll bar would jump around unexpectedly as new conversations came in, so we rebuilt how the list loads.

That's it for June. The team continues to work on a few big features that we'll be launching later this summer and we can't wait to share them with you. See you next month!