Keeping track of your business contacts - be they clients, vendors or leads - just got a whole lot easier thanks to a slick new approach to creating and editing contacts: Rather than opening to a full screen, we're now loading a more compact "modal" (pop-up) experience focusing on the important, everyday details.
Besides an optimized layout and a much needed coat of paint, there's a handful of helpful new features within the create and edit flow:
As you enter the email address for your new contact, we'll check their email domain against other contacts in Accelo to help you find an existing company to link them to. Of course if you only have their @gmail, @outlook or other common/free type of email address, we'll refrain from suggesting a company!
We really wanted to minimize friction in the user experience of this new form, so we've created a hall pass for situations where you actually needed to add a new contact AND a new company, but just don't have the time (or possibly all the detail required) to complete the full Add Company form. So if the company name you enter is unknown to Accelo, we'll create it for you on-the-fly. Of course the next time someone edits that company, they'll probably see a lot of required detail that needs entering!
In cases where you might be adding a contact to an existing company, and suspect the contact already exists on another company, the link existing contact feature allows you to quickly search by name, email or company to find them. Selecting a contact will pull in their core contact details - like their name, status, comments and contact-specific custom fields - which you can edit while also creating a new set of details for the company you are linking them to.
If you've configured some category fields or custom fields which have 'select' (drop-down) options, you'll be able to create new options without having to leave the page. Simply type in the value and if it doesn't exist in the current list of options, you will see a link to "Add new value" - which is taken care of in-line:
Our previous approach was expecting you to enter a physical AND a mailing address for every contact, which was a burden. We'll now just ask for one address - assumed to be the physical location - and apply it as the mailing address by default.
If you let Google help you find the address, we won't even bother you with the individual address fields, street 1, city, state, etc., alternately, if you don't need to record an address, you can now leave this field empty (and update it later if needed).
To help clarify the details of a contact which are tied to their relationship to a company or business, when editing a contact you will see a more distinct Work Details section which keeps track of those details. Importantly, if a contact has a second (or third, or fourth!) company link, you can easily tab into those details.
We've also made it easier to record someone's personal contact information using the Add personal details - which creates a set of personal details - just like the company detail set except without the company!
In some ways, we're saving the best 'til last here.. For those who strive to keep their data up-to-date, it's now much easier if you're working on the List Contacts screen, as the new Edit experience means you don't have to leave the list screen to make changes. Upon save you'll see a little confirmation message and the updated details will be reflected in the list straight away - provided you changed their name, company, position, phone or other field visible in the list!
Yep, the next cab off the rank for a create & edit interface upgrade will be the Tickets (or Issues) area. We know how handy it would be to edit a ticket without having to leave the List Tickets screen!