7 posts tagged with "CRM"

It is common to have parts of communication templates that are repeated across several templates, such as greetings and footers. To assist you with managing templates, you can now create macros, which are snippets that can be inserted into templates, to make managing these sections easier. Macros have access to the same variables and formatting options as the templates they are inserted into. Manage macros here.

You now have the option to notify your engineers when they've been assigned to an event, or a task.

For events, notifications get sent once the employee locked option is checked, and only for events occurring the next 7 days.

In both cases, no notifications will be delivered if you're assigning yourself to a task or event.

We've just rolled out an update to the data import flow available in the web interface, to make it easier to use and more flexible.

Previously, we only supported importing customer and property details from a CSV file with a fixed format of required column names, which in most cases caused a lot of work for anyone trying to map their existing data into the expected format to get the import to work. The new import process addresses this limitation, by allowing you to upload CSV or Excel files with any column configuration, and then letting you pick what fields in JobStaq your spreadsheet columns map onto.

We've also introduced some aggregated fields, to reduce manual processing work required prior to uploading the spreadsheet to the web interface. Initially, we're supporting a combined customer name field (which we'll split into name components), and a combined property address field (which will get split up into lines). We'll continue to monitor feedback and usage of this importer to identify any future potential for more aggregate fields going forwards.

We've also expanded the types of data the importer supports to customers, properties, jobs, notes, assets and events, which we think should cover most use cases of the feature. If you've got any data not supported by this flow, please reach out to our support email, and we'll be happy to help getting your data imported.

Finally, we've made some behind-the-scenes improvements to the data deduplication handling during imports. Our previous import system only supported comparing the data being imported to data in your account before the import started, but we noticed a number of cases where imports contained duplicate records, so have changed this so that we'll attempt to spot duplicate data within a import file and merge this, to keep your database as useful as possible.

You can access the import flow from the settings page of the web interface, by searching "import" in global search, or from this link. Any feedback is appreciated!

We've added a read-only integration for CardDAV clients, allowing you to view your JobStaq customer and employee database from within third party software, such as the iOS contacts app. More details on how to configure this can be found here.

We've improved handling of international (non-GB) phone/mobile numbers and addresses across the software.

Phone Numbers You can continue to enter phone/landline and mobile numbers in the same way you have up until now. However, we've improved validation support for international numbers, and support for formatting these for readability.

You'll need to specify a country dialing code (eg. +44) for any international numbers, and if this is omitted, the number will be interpreted as being from the same country your JobStaq account is set to (GB).

Addresses When creating and editing properties through the website and app, there's now a field to select the country the property is located within. This is used to determine the validation that's applied to the postcode when saving your changes.

At present, address lookups, mapping, and auto-scheduling will continue to only work for properties within the UK, however, if you have a use case for any of these features with international addresses, please reach out to let us know!

To help make finding data within your JobStaq account easier, we've made some changes to how the account search functions.

Your query is now also checked against job descriptions, event descriptions, notes, and job customer reference fields for matches. Some changes have been made to improve detection of phone number in queries, to improve the changes of finding a match.

Following from feedback from some users, we are now offering autocompletion for UK addresses at no additional cost from your regular subscription.

Previously, we were sourcing data from Royal Mail's Postal Address File (PAF), which while good quality was expensive due to licensing terms, resulting in costs for this feature being passed along to users, at around 5p per lookup.

We're now sourcing address data from a different provider which uses other data sources with lower associated costs. From our investigations, the data appears to be good enough for most use cases, and has become the default system for all accounts since this was released earlier today.

If you still wish to use the higher-quality PAF address data, please contact our support team and we can switch your account back to the older pay-per-use lookup system, which benefits from improved location accuracy, higher address coverage, and better support for preventing duplicated data within your account. We plan to offer both systems going forwards, with the eventual goal being to allow you to switch your account between these providers based on your preferences.

Updates to our billing pages to reflect this change will shortly follow over the next few weeks.

What do I do if I have remaining account credit for postcode lookups?

If you purchased account credit to use for our old postcode system and no longer have a use for this, please contact our support team, so we can either refund this credit, or apply it to a future invoice for your subscription.