New Logo and Brand for Capsule
We started Capsule eight years ago with a mission to create a CRM system that’s simple, intuitive and powerful. Every year since we’ve been fortunate and grateful to experience continual growth in our business and customer base. While Capsule as a product has evolved, we’ve never taken the time to update the Capsule brand. We created our original logo at the start of the Capsule journey when we were just three people with a modest budget. As we look to the future we wanted a new brand that communicates who we are now and our ambitions.
Self-reflection
It was clear we needed more than an updated logo. We needed a completely new brand identity that could be applied consistently across everything we do. So we teamed up with Focus Lab to help us get it right. Focus have been on our radar for many years and their work on brands such as 500px and Udacity have been an inspiration.
From the very first meeting, we knew Focus were the right choice. Their creativity and confidence led us through some thought-provoking exercises. This discovery process provided an opportunity for self-reflection, asking questions of who we are? What represents us best? Who do we want to be? What makes us different? Focus helped us leave our comfort zone and explore different concepts. From Capsule as a container to constellations to space Capsules. All the while we tried to stay simple, approachable and trusted with a pinch of playfulness.
After many iterations, we clarified that Capsule isn’t a pill you take to cure your business ailments or some kind of metaphorical container. More than that, it’s a powerful control panel to help you take care of your customers and business.
The new brand
With a clear direction, the Focus team pushed on with the control panel concept. Focus posted some work on Dribbble that received a lot of love from the design community confirming we were on the right track. After several rounds of refinement with Focus, we arrived at our new logo.
The new Capsule logo is unique, made up of switches and buttons to capture the essence of control over your business. Our new color scheme is vibrant and modern while feeling professional and trustworthy. With the logo in place, Focus completed our brand guidelines which define everything we need to know about our new brand, from typography choices through to voice and tone.
Going forward
For those that have been using Capsule for many years, we want to remind you Capsule is still Capsule. We will continue to deliver a CRM system that is simple, intuitive and powerful. What you’ll see from here on out is a more consistent brand experience.
As we turn this corner, we’re deeply thankful to all our customers who have made Capsule possible. We look forward to bringing you further updates to Capsule in the future. We also want to say big thank you to Focus Lab for helping us shed the old and lift up the new.
Announcing Capsule API v2
We’re excited to announce version two of the Capsule API. The API enables developers to build integrations that connect Capsule to other systems and extend the capability of Capsule. Popular integrations that make use of our API include MailChimp, PieSync, HelpScout and Zapier. API v2 makes it even easier for developers to build integrations with Capsule.
While this is largely a release for the benefit of developers, as a Capsule user you’ll also see improvements as developers upgrade their integrations to API v2. For example, integrations using the new API will be listed in their own settings page so it’s easy to see and control the integrations that you have enabled. Integrations on API v2 also have access to an expanded set of functions that enable deeper and smarter integrations.
If you’re a developer, you’ll find that API v2 retains the simple RESTful approach of v1 and introduces new features to improve development, such as OAuth 2 and a richer set of API endpoints and data per request.
API v1 will continue to work until October 27, 2017. We encourage developers to start planning their migration to API v2 now. We’ve tried to make the migration process as easy as possible and have written a migration guide that summarises the changes between API v1 and v2. We also welcome you to join the developer conversation if you have any questions and to help us continue improving our API.
If you’re a developer of a service that hasn’t already integrated with Capsule, we’d love for you to check out the new API. We have a friendly development team who are always happy to answer any questions. We’re super excited to see new integrations that extend our ecosystem with unique and useful ways to take advantage of Capsule.
Recent updates
The Capsule team have been beavering away again and we’re excited to announce a number of new and improved features for Capsule.
New conditions for opportunity lists
When making a list of opportunities it’s now possible to add conditions based on the Expected Value of each opportunity. For instance, it can sometimes be useful to find all your opportunities that are over a certain value. To do that:
Go to your Sales Pipeline List create a new list and then use the [Expected Value] filter.
This will find all your opportunities where the total expected value is over $10,000. This also includes opportunities with recurring revenue based on their total value, so if you had an opportunity worth $3,000 per month over 4 months then you will see it in this list.
If you’re working with multiple currencies it can also be helpful to further narrow down a list to only opportunities with a specific currency. To do that:
Go to your Sales Pipeline List create a new list and then use the [Currency] filter.
Export to Excel files
Capsule now supports exporting directly to Excel. You’ll find a new menu item for this next to the existing command for creating CSV exports:
We hope this will be a time saver if you regularly use spreadsheets to work with your Capsule data.
Reassignment of records when a user is deleted
In the past, whenever a user was deleted from Capsule the tasks, cases and opportunities assigned to that user would be automatically reassigned to whichever user performed the delete.
Now, when deleting a user you’ll see a dropdown list so that you can pick any other Capsule user:
This should provide extra flexibility and simplify the process if there are changes to the people on your team.
Improved linking of new tasks added from the Dashboard
It is now possible to link a task to any contact, case or opportunity when creating tasks on the Dashboard. Just click the link and start typing the name of the record the task relates to.
New FreshBooks integration
An all-new version of FreshBooks was announced a few weeks ago and Capsule’s integration was updated ready to support it.
After migrating to the new FreshBooks your account will be accessed using a new address: my.freshbooks.com. If your Capsule account is already integrated with the older version of FreshBooks then disabling and re-enabling the FreshBooks integration in Capsule will let you enter this new address and begin using the updated integration.
We really hope you find these updates helpful, as always please get in touch on Twitter or email us if there’s anything we can help with. We’d also love to hear any feature suggestions that you have for Capsule.
Covering More Support Hours
As Capsule has grown so has our customer base. We’re very proud to say that we have customers all over the world and we love hearing from them. With our customers being so spread out it has become more important that we can take better care of them and do it more quickly. That’s why late last year I made the hop from our HQ in Manchester, UK to sunny California.
The way things were
When answering emails we found that each morning there was always a big daunting backlog of messages. Anyone emailing in UK after hours waited not only for our day to start but also for the backlog to clear up. We were always in a constant fight against time to be able to help everyone who needed it.
The support team has grown and we’ve implemented ‘All Hands Support’ however we wanted to do more. A great majority of Capsule customers are based in North America so having a support person in the US was an obvious first choice. Being based on the west coast means that there’s a small overlap with the UK team while still covering a lot more hours.
The results
Moving over to the US means that I can take with me all the expertise from my 5 years at Capsule and hit the ground running.
We’re now 9 months in and so far we’re seeing some great results. The morning workload for us in both the UK and the US has been reduced greatly, meaning we can get back to people much more quickly both initially and then throughout the day.
Our customers seem to have noticed as well:
Bottom line
We’re now covering more hours and helping people at a faster rate.
With this post I’m happy to officially announce the change of our support hours. Instead of just covering UK business hours we’re now picking up emails Monday - Friday wherever you are.
Feel free to tweet @capsulecrm or email us at any time about anything you need and someone from our support team will get back to you Monday to Friday. We’re always happy to help and we look forward to hearing from you.
PandaDoc Integration
Creating proposals, quotes and contracts is often a large part of the sales process. The important information for such documents can be found within your Capsule account stored against your contacts and opportunities. Rather than duplicating this information or spending your time copying and pasting from one to the other, PandaDoc have built a seamless Chrome extension for Capsule that enables you to populate your documents with details from Capsule.
- Include the name of your Capsule contact as a signatory
- Populate the title of your document from your sales opportunity
- Include an address for your contact in the proposal
All this can be done using PandaDoc’s Chrome extension and you do it without ever leaving Capsule. When viewing a record in Capsule you’ll also be able to see any existing documents that are linked to them, making it super handy.
Just like Capsule, PandaDoc can help teams and individuals to become more efficient and productive. In addition to the niffty Capsule extension, PandaDoc has some really smart features to help you create and manage professional online documents. If you require a signature to ‘seal the deal’ then electronic signing of contracts gives you a faster turnaround, reduces the cost per contract and you can set up alerts when a contract is viewed and signed.
Getting started with the extension
You can use this link to install the PandaDoc/Capsule extension in Chrome.
Once installed, whenever you view a contact or an opportunity you can click the PandaDoc icon to bring up the panel to create a document. PandaDoc also has a dedicated support article that goes into more detail on how to use the Chrome extension.
Don’t forget to check out this video on how the integration works as well:
Restoring a cancelled Capsule account
Cancelled your Capsule account but then realised you can’t live without it? No worries, we all make mistakes!
With our new cancellation process your Capsule account is retained on our systems for 14 days in a disabled state so that it can’t be accessed. If you cancelled by mistake, forgot to export a copy of your data, or simply changed your mind during the 14 day grace period then you have the choice to recover the account and all of your data.
After the 14 days are up, the account and any data retained will be permanently removed from our systems.
We’ve updated our data retention policy and terms to match the new cancellation process.
Improved link sharing, a smarter files tab & some visual polish
We’d like to share some small but helpful updates we’ve been working on. They’re simple additions that we hope will make your Capsule experience that much smoother.
Get direct link to notes and emails
Firstly we’ve added a ‘Get Link’ option to notes and emails menus, handy for when you need to share a note directly with a colleague. Simply click Get Link and copy to your clipboard.
Copy to clipboard
In addition across the app we’ve added copy to clipboard in lots of places where it’s useful - API keys, email addresses etc, saving you a little leg work. If you’re using Safari you won’t see the button to copy directly to your clipboard as this ability is not yet supported. We hear this feature is coming to Safari soon so until then just copy as you normally would!
Improved internal links
Sometimes it’s useful to reference another record in Capsule, like a contact, case or opportunity when you’re entering a note. It’s always been possible to do this by copying and pasting the link into the note. We’ve made a couple of improvements to how these links work in a note. Firstly we display the links in a shorter format to reduce visual noise and keep your notes looking clean. Secondly, the hover cards now work on these links so that you get a quick view without having to click through the link.
Avatars on contact searches
Now when searching for contacts to add to a Case or Opportunity or when linking a new person to an organisation you’ll see small avatars next to the filtered names. It’s a small thing, but should help you recognize a contact faster!
Grouped repeating files
Finally we’ve added some smart grouping to the files tab so from now on any repeating image files will be grouped. This helps to reduce the clutter created by emails stored in Capsule that repeat the same email footer images. Images files are grouped based on file size and name, so you’ll still be able to see image files of the same name separately when storing file versions using the same name.
Introducing two-factor authentication
Today we’re releasing new features to help Capsule users maximise security on their account.
Firstly, we’ve added an opt-in security feature called two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication helps protect your account even if someone has obtained or guessed your password. Two-factor authentication is becoming common place for protecting sensitive online accounts such as banking, email and business services. Once enabled, you’ll need to enter both your password and a one-time code that is generated by your mobile phone when logging in to Capsule.
To enable two-factor authentication, just visit the new Password and Security section that we’ve added under Capsule user preferences. This contains all your security related settings. Another new feature you’ll see is a history of recent logins to your account, and if you ever need it, you can also log yourself out from all other browsers.
If you are a Capsule account administrator and visit the Users section of your Capsule account settings, you’ll find details of which users have enabled two-factor authentication and a history of recent logins by any user on the account.
You can find out more about our two-factor authentication in our documentation. If you have any questions about this or need help setting it up, please just send us an email.
Improved Social Search
Social search in Capsule is a popular feature that scans the web and social networks to match contacts in your Capsule account with their social profiles to help you better connect with your contacts on social networks.
We’ve been rolling out upgrades to the social search over the past few months and are now including results from a third party lookup service. As a result users on the Professional plan will see a wider range of social profile matches across social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
If you haven’t already activated social search on your Capsule account, you can do so by following these instructions https://capsulecrm.com/support/social-integrations/#find-social-profiles-for-your-contacts
We’d love to hear how you find the new enhanced social search - if you spot any results for the wrong contact please get in touch on support@capsulecrm.com so we can take a look.
