What is Activity Tracking and Why Is It Important?
Last month we added custom activity tracking and activity reporting to Capsule. You might have had a chance to check it out but if not we’ll explain in this post more about what activity tracking is and why so many businesses consider it to be an important part of their sales and management processes.
You already had the ability to store notes in Capsule prior to our recent updates. At the same time as releasing the Teams plan, we updated the Professional plan to include the ability to log calls and meetings as activity types. On the new Teams plan, we also added the ability to add custom activity types that might be more suited to your industry, so you can be more specific about what activity types are tracked and reported on.
In addition to tracking activities we have also introduced activity reports where you can view which activity types are completed by which user and which team.
Using our activity tracking feature allows you to have a centralized record of what communication has occurred between your business and your customers, allowing for an informed and personalized approach to customers, from sales right through to customer service.
Our simple approach to activity tracking allows you to log details about activities quickly and easily without losing focus. For example you might be using a phone system integration such as Circle Loop to record calls in Capsule, this would then be logged and would then feed into the activity reporting.
Activity tracking can also be a motivational tool as users can see what activities their peers are doing and can see the best course of action to take based on their peers behaviour.
Managing and monitoring activities is one of the benefits of activity tracking, while there is this management aspect to activity tracking that helps managers stay on top of what their staff are doing and making sure they are following the right steps to reach their goals, there is also a huge benefit to users. With everyone being able to record their activity against a contact, users are confident and empowered to take the next step with customers.
We hope you enjoy using the activity tracking and reporting features in Capsule, If you have any questions or need any support, please don’t hesitate to contact our friendly support team.
Grow your business with our new Teams plan - a scalable solution for larger and expanding businesses
Today, we’re launching a powerful new upgrade that helps you and your business grow with Capsule. Say “hello” to our new Teams plan.
We started Capsule with the vision of providing simple, powerful tools that help businesses take care of customers and make the most of sales opportunities. With over 15,000 businesses using Capsule, spanning a wide range of industries, sizes and structures, we’ve improved on this initial vision by introducing much-anticipated tools that help businesses manage larger teams.
At the heart of the Teams plan are Teams and Roles. These simple concepts enable powerful controls that scale from small to large organizations, and support an easy upgrade path for customers as they grow. You can now organize your users into teams, control who can see what by applying one of the three user roles available, and report on performance across your entire business.
Let’s dig a little deeper into what you can do with Teams and Roles.
Working with Teams
With Teams, you can allocate your leads, customers and sales opportunities to teams that match your organizational structure, and then secure access through team membership. Is your company organized into departments? Create teams and assign different records to each department. Or, you could just create a single team for your management group who can then access more sensitive records. Whether your business is centered around a core team or divided into multiple groups, there’s a way that Teams can work for you.
Using Teams to secure sensitive contacts
You might not want to share all contacts, think about advisors and investors for example, with everyone on your account. Teams gives you the control you need to restrict access to those contacts. Just create a separate team in your account and assign any sensitive contacts to that team. Now only users you add to that particular team can access those contacts.
Restricting users to their own records
Businesses often outsource work and those people need access to some parts of Capsule too, but not all of it. Equally, salespeople often only need and want access to their own records. We’ve got you covered with that too. Just choose the new “Restricted” user role on a person’s user settings and they’ll only see the records that they own. Any records which aren’t assigned to a team or owner will be available to all users who aren’t restricted users.
Real relationship management
In Capsule you can already own and assign ownership to sales opportunities, cases and tasks. With this update, we’ve extended this feature to organizations and people. Now each account or lead can be assigned an owner, ensuring that there is someone responsible for taking care of all relationships.
Reports you can act on
Alongside Teams and Roles, we’re introducing an advanced set of reports for the Teams plan to give businesses deeper insight into performance across their whole company. See what opportunities you’ve won and lost and then drill down to see this over time, by owner and by team - helping you to identify successes and roadblocks. The pipeline reports show you the number of sales opportunities by team, owner, and milestone as well as a pipeline forecast that allows you to see projected revenue. The powerful filters available on each report empower your team to analyze and present the numbers the way they want to.
Activity reporting specific to your business
Tracking user activity helps you and your team understand all of the communication your organization has had with each contact. We’ve recently added to the Professional plan Call and Meeting as new activity types that can be logged alongside Notes on a contact’s history. We know that every business isn’t the same, that’s why with the Teams plan you can add custom activity types for your users to log. You can then see these custom activity types on activity reports which detail who did what and when.
An integration for business intelligence Coming soon
Connect Google Data Studio to Capsule and combine Capsule opportunity data with other sources to create interactive dashboards and build powerful reports that enable you to make better business decisions.
This feature will be available very soon. We are currently waiting for Google to review the Capsule connector for Data Studio.
Getting started with Teams
All the features mentioned above are available on the new Teams plan. In addition, on the Teams plan you’ll also be able to store up to 100,000 contacts compared to 50,000 on the Professional plan.
If you’re not already using Capsule, you can start your free trial of our Teams plan and be up and running in minutes. You can also take a look at our pricing page for more information on Capsule pricing and to compare all plans available.
If you’re already a Capsule Professional customer, we’ll be sending you details of the Teams plan and pricing. You can start a trial of Teams by upgrading to Teams at no extra cost until Feb. 1st 2019. If Teams isn’t for you, alongside launching this new plan we’ve also expanded the features available on the Professional plan to include activity reporting, a sales volume report and new activity types such as call and meeting.
For more in-depth information on how to use Teams take a look at our Getting Started Guide for Teams and Roles. We’re really excited to share this new addition to Capsule with you and hope we can help you get the most out of it in order to support you in growing your business.
If you have any questions or need any support, please don’t hesitate to contact our friendly support team.
Gmail add-on improvements
On August 1st we released our Gmail add-on. The add-on allowed everyone to store their email conversations easily within Capsule. Over the last few months we’ve been making improvements thanks to the great feedback we’ve received from those of you using the add-on. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s quick and easy to install.
Reducing the number of clicks
One of the first improvements we made was to reduce the amount of clicks that were needed to store a conversation. We achieved this by improving a number of flows for storing conversations.
- Instead of having to click a contact in the list, and then click the store item, you can now click Store next to the contact in the list
- When adding a new contact you have the option to store the conversation on that new contact when saving
- When adding a new opportunity or case to a contact you have the option to store the conversation on that opportunity or case when saving
Change where conversations are being stored
Today we’re announcing another big improvement. You can now change where future emails in a conversation will be stored. Previously to change where a conversation is stored, you would need to disable storing, and then store again on the record you wanted to change the storing to. A potential downside to this was that every email in the conversation was then moved to that record. This behavior could cause unwanted emails from long running threads to be moved also.
Now you can use a new option ‘Store on a different contact, opportunity, or case’ which allows you change where a conversation should be stored from now on. It also allows you to specify if you would like to move a number of most recent emails, or all emails in the conversation.
When the conversation is stored on a contact, you will see their related opportunities and cases, so it’s easy to change storing to an opportunity when a conversation evolves into a potential sale. You can also choose to store on a different contact in thread and their related opportunities or cases.
If the conversation is already stored on an opportunity, or case you will see the opportunities and cases for the contact related to the current opportunity or case.
We hope you enjoy these improvements to the add-on! We’re always open to more feedback. Let us know if you have any thoughts or questions.
New Ways to Interact with Cases and Opportunities
We’ve been working hard on updating Cases & Opportunities in Capsule. Let’s take a look at what’s new.
New List Pages for Cases and Opportunities
We’re well aware that some of our customers have lots of sales opportunities and cases that they need to be able to sort, see and select quickly and easily. We’ve redesigned the Cases and Opportunity list pages to ensure the information you need is just a click away.
You no longer need to have to ‘Create a new list’, you can jump straight into making your list using the filters available from the Opportunity List or Cases pages.
Some information in those lists may be more important to you than others. You can now edit the columns in the table so that you can show or hide the columns that are most relevant to you. To coincide with this, you can also reorder the columns, bringing the information that’s most valuable to you to the front of the list.
Create Cases from Opportunities
Gaining a client or making a sale is just one part of business. Actually delivering the goods or services is another and that’s where Cases comes in, to record details of what happens after a sale is made or a client is won. Previously, to create a case based on a sales opportunity you had to either duplicate the information or add a link from the opportunity to the case. Now there’s a new way cases and opportunities can work together - by creating a linked case for an opportunity at the push of a button.
You can do this for any opportunity no matter what stage it is at or what status it has. Simply select the opportunity and select ‘add a linked case’ on the opportunity dropdown menu. Once the case is linked you’ll be able to see any linked cases from the opportunity.
You’ll also be able to link and unlink opportunities from the case summary page. If the case is linked to an opportunity you’ll be able to unlink it from the dropdown menu or if you wish to link an opportunity to a case you can link it by opening the dropdown menu and searching for a contact name or opportunity name.
We hope you enjoy these updates. Keep your eyes peeled - there’s more on the way soon that will enhance your Capsule experience.
Do more from your inbox with our new Gmail add-on
We know customer relationships often start with an email. Whether you have a new lead or are nurturing existing relationships, having your CRM in your inbox can be a huge time saver. Bringing Capsule to where you need it is our mission, and we’re excited to announce our new Gmail Add-on.
Store the entire conversation with ease
Storing email conversations just got easier. With just a click or two you can store your entire conversation thread in Capsule. Choose to store on a contact, case or on a specific opportunity. As more emails come into the thread, they’ll be stored automatically with no extra leg work.
Contact details right next to your emails
When you receive an email from an existing contact, all of their contact details in Capsule will display in the add-on, making it easy to grab their phone number if you need to give them a quick call, or find them on a social network.
Add new contacts
If you receive an email from a contact that’s not in Capsule, you can add them as a person or organization directly from Gmail. We’ll also identify contacts with the same organization email address. So if someone has emailed from the same company who isn’t stored in your Capsule account yet, we’ll pre-populate the organization name when you add them as a new contact.
Add follow-up tasks, cases and opportunities
Take action from your email threads and add tasks straight from Gmail. Tasks can be added to a contact, case or opportunity for any contact in the conversation including CC’d participants.
Use the add-on from within your Gmail Android app
If you primarily use email from your Android phone, then the Gmail Add-on will be perfect for you. You can use the full functionality of the Gmail Add-on, so you don’t have to keep switching out to Capsule Mobile to see contact details and add tasks, opportunities or cases.
Gmail add-ons are not yet supported on the Gmail iOS app, but Google are working on it.
Installing the add-on
To install the add-on on your Gmail account read our install guide.
We hope you enjoy our new Gmail add-on! Please let us know if you have any thoughts or questions.
Recent updates
Over the past six months, we’ve been quietly migrating Capsule to a new application architecture. Whilst you might not share the same excitement for web technologies that we do, you’ll be pleased to hear that this gives us greater flexibility when making improvements in the future. It allows new functionality to be delivered faster and enables a more seamless user experience that wasn’t previously technically possible. The change has already facilitated improvements to contact lists and the opportunity pipeline, today we’d like to announce a few more changes.
A Better Calendar
Our new application architecture empowers us to build interfaces that are faster and more productive than before. Consequently there’s a number of areas where we’ve identified opportunities for improvements, the first of which are on the calendar. With these changes we wanted to build on the straightforward look and feel while strengthening task management and navigation.
The new calendar also loads faster. To improve the performance of the calendar we had to limit the number of tasks displayed in a month. This has the added benefit of reducing the clutter on screen, so you can get a sense of the month ahead and plan in more detail using the new week view.
Improved Navigation
Something we know wasn’t as simple as it could be was navigating between months and years. This is now made easy with a new year and month picker.
You can still use the arrows to navigate from one month to the next, or you can use the menu to quickly switch between month and year. You can always hit today to return back to today’s date.
Drag and Drop
Moving tasks around your calendar has always been simple but we’ve now made it easier to move your tasks between months and even years.
Any selected day will remain selected as you navigate to different months and years. You can then drag tasks from the sidebar to a new due date or move tasks to the selected day by dragging from the calendar to the sidebar.
Week View
We know that its important to be able to get an overview of all the tasks you have on any given day. So, alongside the month view we’ve added a new week view to help you plan the week ahead.
This view allows you to navigate through your tasks, week by week, while maintaining a selected day in the sidebar to allow you to easily move tasks between weeks and months.
Tasks
Filtering your calendar and tasks list has been made more powerful.
Both owner and category filters have been improved to allow you to search for the owner or category you’d like to filter by, while also allowing you to be able to filter by multiple categories.
We hope you enjoy these latest updates! Over the coming months we will be listening to your feedback to make further improvements to your Capsule experience. Any questions please let us know if you have any thoughts or questions.
Capsule and the GDPR - Part 2
Today (May 25th) the new General Data Protection Regulations comes into force. The GDPR is the biggest shake up to data regulation and protection for a generation. Our first blog post about the GDPR covered recording consent within your Capsule account and introduced some new features to assist with your compliance, such as responding to subject access requests and deleting data permanently. We’d like to take this opportunity to share with you some more information about what we have been doing to prepare for the GDPR, and offer tips to help with your compliance.
New Customer Terms, Privacy Policy and Data Processing Agreement
By now you’ve hopefully had chance to read our new Customer Terms, Privacy Policy and our Data Processing Agreement. If you continue to use Capsule from today, we’ll assume that you’ve both read and agree with these documents. There is no need to sign any of these documents as your continued use of Capsule automatically indicates consent.
EU Data Protection Documentation and GDPR FAQs
The GDPR affects anyone storing or processing information about EU citizens, and we now have a dedicated support document intended to help our customers who are storing information about contacts in the EU assess their compliance. It includes details about where we host Capsule data, our obligations as your Data Processor and encryption of Capsule data.
For more reading, we’ve a prepared comprehensive list of GDPR FAQs which may be useful if you are required to perform a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) or Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA). They cover Capsule’s responsibility as a Data Controller of your personal data, and yours as the Data Controller for your contact’s information.
New Social Search Integration
Previously Capsule would use contact details to automatically find social networks and profile images to enrich your contact profiles. With the GDPR we’ve now disabled this functionality by default and added a new optional Social Search Integration to Capsule.
The GDPR doesn’t allow you to assume that you can use anyone’s publicly available contact information, such as social network profiles or pictures. With the new Social Search Integration you now have greater control over what social network information is retrieved in line with your agreements or privacy policy with your contacts.
Capsule honors the privacy controls of each network when searching for profiles, and as a result you’ll only see matches where the contact has made their profile public.
For instructions on how to enable the Social Search in your account, please see this support document.
Recording Consent with our Website Contact Form Integration
If you’re already taking advantage of our Website Contact Form Integration to capture new leads straight into Capsule, you may wish to also record marketing consent at the same time. All you need is a custom field and our Website Contact Form included on your website.
Follow the steps here to get setup with our Website Contact Form and begin recording consent with your new leads.
Please email us if you have any questions and we’ll be happy to answer.
Zendesk App Updates
Capsule has offered a Zendesk app for a long time. When viewing a support ticket, the app can be used to see related contact details from Capsule directly inside Zendesk.
Late last year, Zendesk released a new version of their app platform. As such, we’ve taken the opportunity to modernize the Capsule Zendesk app, streamline how it works, and add some new features. Here’s a quick look at what’s new:
Redesigned user experience
Not only does the app look a lot more modern, you’ll also find it feels much more integrated within Zendesk’s interface. Matching contacts is now quicker and smarter, while the contact profile still contains all of the information you need from your Capsule account.
Contact matching improvements
If there isn’t an exact match on the Zendesk ticket requester details in Capsule, you’ll be navigated to the matching page so that you can create a match yourself. From here, you can either choose to add the ticket requester as a new contact in Capsule, or if you know the contact is already in Capsule, perhaps under a slightly different name, you can search for them and make a match.
When you have identified a match through the search function - you can press the “Match” button next to each search result. Pressing this button moves the contact that you’ve selected into the main profile view and also adds the ticket requester’s email address to the contact in Capsule, automatically linking the ticket and the contact.
This has the added bonus of improving the accuracy of the app’s automated initial search, meaning you’re much more likely to get matched with the correct contact in the future.
Twitter matching
As well as email tickets, Zendesk also supports tickets generated by Twitter. The app will now match contacts in your Capsule account based on the ticket’s Twitter handle. And if you need to make a match, the Twitter handle will automatically be added to the contact so you know who you’re talking to the next time they contact you via Twitter.
Enhanced search results
Previously, identifying the right person or organization in existing contacts could sometimes be difficult. For instance, if multiple search results had the same name, there would be no way to differentiate them since we only presented the name.
You’ll now be able to see the contact’s profile picture, along with their organization directly in the search results. And if this still isn’t enough, we’ve linked each contact to their corresponding Capsule page, so all you need to do is click on their name to get the full details.
Migrating to the new version
All users will automatically be updated to the new version of the app, all you need to do is add your Capsule Personal Access Token to the Zendesk app.
We hope you enjoy the new Zendesk app! Please let us know if you have any thoughts or questions.
New and improved contact lists
We want you to feel like there’s no obstacle in the way of you and your contacts. With that in mind we’ve made a bunch of improvements you’re going to love on our contact lists pages. We’ll be rolling this update out to all accounts in the coming weeks. If you want the new page right away, click ‘Turn On’ on the People & Organizations page. Here are the highlights:
Quick and easy filtering
First off, all actions now take fewer clicks. To filter contacts, you no longer need to ‘Create a new list’, you can start filtering as soon as you visit your People & Organizations page. You’ll find all our usual filters are still there, including any custom fields you’ve defined in your account settings.
Once you’ve applied a filter such as ‘Tag’, you can add more filters such as ‘Name’ if you want to find a specific contact.
Manage saved lists
If you want to save a list, you can do so in the ‘Saved Lists’ drop down menu on the top left side of the page. This is where you’ll also find system lists and any other saved lists you already created. Alternatively, if all you’re doing is filtering on the fly, you can restore to an unfiltered state by clicking ‘Clear Filters’ on the far right.
Direct selection and bulk actions
Something we’ve wanted to bring you for a while is the ability to directly select contacts in a list. This gives you more control when you’re performing bulk tasks such as adding tags or exporting contacts. If you want to perform a bulk action on all contacts, such as adding a tag, you can click the 'Add Tag’ button without selecting any contacts and the action will apply to all your contacts in the current list.
New ‘OR’ conditions
When you’re creating a set of conditions you’re often trying to match more than one value. Previously you couldn’t say ‘show me contacts whose country is US or UK’, now you can. Selecting several countries in the country filter will act as an OR condition.
You can also add OR conditions to text fields. For example, to find contacts whose job title contains manager or lead, you can open the job title filter and press the plus button to add an OR condition.
Add or remove columns
Sometimes you need to focus on particular details about a contact, such as when you last contacted them. You can now hide and show columns as you need them using the table settings button and checking or unchecking the columns you’d like to be displayed. You can even view your own custom field data in the table to give you everything you need. Saving a list will also save the column structure you created.
Column ordering
After deciding which columns you need, you can also move them to the order you want with a simple drag and drop.
Sort by
You can also use the same table settings button used to edit columns to sort by a select number of fields. Just click on the “sort by” button and select one of the six options you would like to sort by. Simple but useful!
We hope this makes managing your contacts even easier. Please let us know if you have any thoughts or questions.