October 2019 Product Updates

October was another busy month for our product team with updates and improvements that help improve your calling speed, improve your texting communication with leads and clients, and making the People screen a whole lot easier to use.

Highlights:

• Automatic phone number validation
• Auto-Advance Calling
• Adding images to our texting feature
• People screen improvements

New Features

Automatic Phone Number Validation

It can be really time-consuming to go through the effort of calling a number for a new lead, just to find out it’s a fake. So to help eliminate that from your day, we now automatically validate every new phone number that gets added to Follow Up Boss.

In addition to making the number red and crossing it out, we now also automatically move it to the bottom of the list if you’ve got multiple numbers for a contact, and have added the same feature for invalid or unsubscribed emails as well.

This improvement also lays the foundation for further improvements we’ll be making to our integrated calling feature.

Call Lists

Today we’re excited to announce a brand new feature for our customers with the calling add-on, call lists! You can now create a list of people to call from the person screen by selecting a list and pressing the new call list button located at the top of the table. You can also create a call list from any smart list in one click by pressing this button while looking at the smart list.

You can see the feature in action as part of the new video we put together covering everything our integrated calling features can do:

When calling your lists, we’ll automatically filter out people missing phone numbers or numbers marked as invalid in Follow Up Boss when creating your list. When you’re in the middle of your call list simply hit the next button in the call bar to start dialing the next person with a single click.

If you’ve got anyone on your team using the integrated calling feature, especially ISAs or productive buyer agents, they’ll see a huge increase in the number of calls they can make each day with this addition.

Send MMS

I know, I know. You really want to send your favorite cat picture to your potential leads. We’ve all been there.

Well, I’m happy to announce today that you can do that!

We also put together a short video walking you through how it works:

Receive MMS on iPhone

Version 2.5 of the iPhone app adds a redesigned messaging screen that will support displaying any received images.

The ability to send images in texts from the mobile app is coming in a future update

This update addresses an issue that could cause incoming calls to be logged twice.

Task Types in FUB2

You can now add types to tasks in the desktop app. This will allow you to better prioritize your due tasks so you can filter for things like calls to make sure they’re tackled first:

Tasks are now a top-level navigation link making it a whole lot easier to get to your tasks.

Check out our video for more information about these changes:

Improvements

A Faster Follow Up Boss!

We upgraded all our servers to the best tech available anywhere today and have seen a huge improvement in the speed and responsiveness of the system.

To put the image below into context, we used to have an average response time of 80-90ms and have cut that in half to around 40ms!

New Integrations Page

We updated the integrations page to make it a whole lot easier for you to find and set up systems that play nicely with Follow Up Boss.

We’ve got everything from robust website integrations to lead capture to nurturing tools that help start more conversations with your contacts.

Click there to check out some other products that can help you drive even more sales results for your team!

Column selection Re-design

Finding columns used to be painful. With this new design we’ve made it a whole lot easier for you to find the columns you need to help build Smart Lists that ensure your best opportunities never slip through the cracks.

Time-based filtering

A lot of customers told us they needed more granular timeframe options for filtering their Smart Lists. Say, for example, you want to call a new lead multiple times in the first day, you can now have contacts come back onto your lists after a couple of hours rather than only having a ‘days’ option.

We’ve now added:

• Minutes
• Hours
• Weeks
• Months
• Years

Improved Email Subject Lines for @Mentions

It used to be difficult to quickly see which update notifications were the most important to focus on right away since the subject lines were the same for a lot of different types of activity.

We improved this specifically for the situations where you’re mentioned in a note on a contact.

Now the subject line will read: “Dave mentioned you in a note about Sally Smith”.

Fixes

Breaking styles when Piggy chrome extension is installed

If you had this Piggy chrome extension then FUB styles would be broken for you.

To solve this we have upgraded a library and that seems to have resolved the issue. If you have disabled the extension and would like to re-enable it, you can do so now.

Fixes for reporting timeframes

We’ve adjusted the timeframes for the dashboard and reporting screens to be inclusive of today where applicable (e.g. “Last 7 Days”, “This Week”, etc), where before they were not.

We learned from customers that this is more aligned with what they were expecting to see, so it should make your reports a lot clearer and easier to understand.

Updated core libraries for FUB2

This will improve stability while also allowing us to use the latest tech to bring you even better features in a more stable way.

There was also some optimizations in certain scenarios in how we fetch data from the server.

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