We’re a quarter through the year and boy what a shocker. We’re all struggling a little with social isolation and I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been chatting with customers more than ever just for the soul. But we haven’t stopped and today a new release is here.
The main items in this release are:
User Activity Status & Profile Avatars
Not the most requested addition, but User Activity Status is a crucial building block for many upcoming highly requested features. Today we’re announcing a simple User Activity System with an Online, Away and Offline Status.
The User Activity Status picker is simple, choose between Online & Away. Use Online when you want Contacts to be assigned to you. Use Away when you don’t. You can choose your Status from the Profile menu on the top right of the platform.
The Offline status is handled automatically. If you log out of the platform or are inactive for too long, you will be moved to Offline status. Once you become active or log back in, you will be switched back to your previous status - Online or Away.
The amount of time it takes a platform User to timeout based on activity can be configured in Space settings. We’ve set the default to 5 minutes, however, the setting can be adjusted from 1 to 60 minutes.
As part of this change, our developers added avatars. They are used in the Assignee list and are coming to more places soon. Kudos to the team for implementing one of the most beautiful Avatar editors I have ever seen.
Automatic Contact Assignment
One of the most highly requested features is here - Automatic Contact Assignment. When enabled in Settings, Contacts are assigned to a User automatically whenever a Contact’s Status changes to Pending.
In practice this means, Contacts that would have normally landed in the New filter will be assigned directly to the next available user. Contact can be assigned automatically Round Robin style or by assigning to the user with the least amount of Contacts.
We’ve also added the option to assign Contacts automatically but only to Online Contacts. That way, if you don’t want to be assigned Contacts you can switch your User Activity Status to Away.
Bits & Bobs
As usual, we’ve made a couple of changes or improvements around the platform that you might be interested in.
Facebook Message Tags
Some of you have already noticed that Facebook no longer allows users to reply to Contacts after 24 hours without a message tag.
To message Contacts after 24 hours Facebook has provided the following messages tags:
- Confirmed Event Update
- Post-Purchase Update
- Account Update
We’ve now enabled platform Users to send tagged messages. Remember to use tagged messages carefully as Facebook will likely be reviewing Facebook pages that are using the tags incorrectly.
Segments Are Now Views And Can Be Deleted
Another popular feature request - the ability to delete Segments. While making this change we have changed the name of the feature from Segments to Views.
When using the View dropdown in the Contacts or Messages module each individual view can now be renamed or deleted. We’re not done here though, some exciting additions are coming to views in the next release.
Nexmo Is Now Vonage
Nexmo has rebranded itself under the Vonage platform. This means we’ll be doing the same. If you’ve connected Nexmo SMS or Nexmo WhatsApp don’t be alarmed if it says Vonage now.
That’s it for this release, see you in a month or so.
