Reason for Update:
Business Pilot goes through development each week and is being improved behind the scenes, we’ve got some great updates on the way to you.
Let’s see what we got up to last week…
This week we are pleased to announce that we have released a major refresh of the diary area of the CRM!
Over the last 12 months we have listened to our user feedback and made improvements and additions based on the requests and needs of our customers.
Much of this has been going on behind the scenes in recent months but with the major changes of Status Progression work we had to get that released first and we are now pleased to be able to provide another immediate upgrade!
Lead/Contract Link:
We are happy to introduce, a highly requested feature to our Diary, we have included a link within the diary entry which relates to the Lead or Contract page for the Customer the appointment is booked for.
Sales and Survey appointments link to the Customers Lead page, while Service entries link to the Customers Contract page.
Clicking on the Customer Name on the Diary view will have the same results, this change dramatically improves the diary usability on smaller devices such as mobiles and tablets.
Managing Multiple Appointments:
Following the change from follow-ups to tasks we have been able to introduce another new feature, where you are able to book more than one appointment.
Historically if you needed to add an additional appointment the previous entry would be removed out of the diary.
Now you can add additional appointments without affecting previous entries.
Ongoing appointments and previous appointments are not affected in anyway.
To help manage and track these we’ve introduced an appointment tab in the lead and contract so you can see a history of all appointments made throughout the customers journey.
Provisional/Confirmed Appointments:
Inside the appointment tab you are able to book and select whether an appointment is provisional or confirmed. These are defaulted as confirmed, as you can see in the image below. When scheduling the appointments for a member of the team you can choose whether this is ‘Provisional’ instead.
This means you save the appointment as provisional to block out the diary where someone can go back and ‘Confirm’ them – once Confirmed the Sales Representative, Surveyor or Service Engineer will receive an email notification.
You will notice some visual differences to the colours in the diary, provisional appointments will now have the colour on the left hand side, similar to the schedule board and once confirmed this will fill as a solid colour. The colours are still specific to the Appointment Type as before.
We have also included the town in the appointment ticket as you can see below for Mr & Mrs Rowlands set for F Frank.
Update to Email Notifications:
We have also included General appointments in our email notifications. If you were to set a Sales Meeting in the Diary the User will receive an email, the same as we have for the actual Lead/Contract Sales, Survey and Service appointments.
Refreshed Mobile Compatibility:
Whilst the CRM diary has always been mobile optimised we have made ‘under the hood’ changes and refreshed our code to ensure everything continues to work as slick as possible with the ever changing iOS and Android platforms.
Default View to Full Week:
As many of us do not work a normal Monday to Friday we have changed the default view to a full week view to include weekends, as now most of our customers include Saturdays as a work week.
Filtering Diary Users:
If you have had changes to your company and a user becomes inactive, you don’t want to delete these users from Business Pilot instead, you’d hope to keep their historic data on the system, previous and future appointments, ready to redistribute in the diary.
Once the retired user has been deactivated and suspended in your ‘Manage User’ settings this will mark these users as archived.
Archived contacts are automatically pushed towards the bottom of the diary selection while Active, current users have become a priority, hopefully saving you time while selecting diaries to view.
An archived user and diary location is automatically restored when their user has been reactivated.
Appointment Descriptions:
When we released Status Progression, we’d removed the description field in the diary as this has no link to the customers page, we have received a fair few support calls regarding this field so we have added the description field back into the diary for Sales/ Survey and Service appointments.
We do suggest writing these notes into the Install Instructions in the Lead/Contract page to pull through on the APP and have a record in the customers file but they can be handy for internal use.
Business Pilot has a continual development cycle and all new features are included within your subscription. In fact, as a user, we encourage you to ask for more! That way, we all benefit from a continually improved system.