Q2—2022 Product Release Webinar

Watch our webinar from April 27th, 2022

Insightly CEO
Insightly Marketing Team

Your CRM must continue to evolve over time to meet the changing needs of your organization. Insightly’s latest release has several new features to make using Insightly easier and more effective for you and. your team. Let’s explore these updates!

In this recording, join Insightly CEO Anthony Smith as he shares the latest updates to the Insightly platform and a sneak peek at what’s coming soon.

Anthony kicks this off with a quick recap of what the team has delivered to enhance the platform over the past year. After that, he goes into a deeper dive on AppConnect, Insightly’s low-code integration engine, which has transformed the way so many of our customers are working now.  Then he runs down all the great updates the team has made across Insightly Service, Marketing, and CRM, updates across the platform, followed by what’s coming soon. 

Insightly launched two new products this past year with Insightly AppConnect, our integration automation platform, and Insightly Service, our helpdesk and ticketing system.

We’ve been adding a lot of new features to both those products since we launched them, and we’ve also added new features to our other products across the board so we’re excited to take you through the full suite of products in this webinar. We’ve got a lot to cover, and at the end you’ll see a sneak peak of some of the fantastic upcoming features we’ve got in store for the future. So these features and improvements I’m talking about today are either already released, or being rolled out to you over the next few weeks.

 

 

Transcript - Latest release features

Hi there, and thank you so much for joining us today.  We’re excited to bring you a plethora of updates about the Insightly platform. There’s a lot to get through today in a short amount of time, so let’s get things started. 

I’m Melinda Prescher, Insightly’s product marketing director. I’m thrilled to have Anthony Smith, Insightly’s CEO, as my guest on today’s webinar. You’re going to hear directly from him about all of the fantastic updates that our teams have been working on to bring you more advanced features and functionality that drive more value for you and your business.  Please know that we’re recording this webinar and will send out the recording to everyone in the next day or so. I also want to invite you to ask questions via the chat pod. We’ll be answering those during the webinar and if there are any remaining questions, we’ll have Anthony answer questions before we close out. 

 

Anthony is going to kick this off with a quick recap of what the team has delivered to enhance the platform over the past year. After that, he’ll go into a deeper dive on AppConnect, our low-code integration engine, which has transformed the way so many of our customers are working now.  Then he’ll run down all the great updates the team has made across Insightly Service, Marketing, and CRM, updates across the platform, and then what’s coming soon. 

And then we’ll close out with any questions.   

 

Anthony, let’s get this kicked off with a quick recap. I’ll hand it over to you. 

We launched two new products this past year with Insightly AppConnect, our integration automation platform, and Insightly Service, our helpdesk and ticketing system.

We’ve been adding a lot of new features to both those products since we launched them, and we’ve also added new features to our other products across the board so we’re excited to take you through the full suite of products today and we’ve got a lot to cover, and at the end we’ll give you a sneak peak of some of the fantastic upcoming features we’ve got in store for the future. So these features and improvements I’m talking about today are either already released, or being rolled out to you over the next few weeks.

Slide 4 AppConnect

So we’ll start off with AppConnect, our integration automation platform. AppConnect allows you to connect Insightly and its data up to all the other software applications you use to get work done every day, ad it includes out of the box over 500 pre-built connectors to lots of software packages across HR, Finance, IT, Sales, Marketing, Productivity and Data storage. It’s easy to create integrations with a simple drag and drop user interface so you don’t have to write any code, and it’s natively integrated into Insightly so it supports all your Insightly objects and data, including custom objects.

We’re adding new connectors to Insightly AppConnect all the time, and recently we’ve added new connectors to the over 500 we already have in the areas of marketing, data storage, database, and programming languages.

AppConnect is integrated into almost every part of Insightly, and the ability to run an AppConnect integration called a recipe can be done from a lot of places in Insightly. Recently we added the ability to run an integration from a Workflow Action in Insightly Marketing. 

We don’t have any usage limits on the number of records you pull out of Insightly using AppConnect in a day, or the number of data changes you make into Insightly using AppConnect, which makes it much more advantageous than using the Insightly API for those sort of operations which have those daily API limits in place.

We also added the ability to select a few records from any list in Insightly, then as a new bulk actions option you can run an AppConnect integration across those records you’ve just selected. This is great for if you want to selectively transfer records you’ve selected to another system using AppConnect, or to run an entire process like sending out postcards or gifts to people you’ve selected in a list using AppConnect.

Based on customer requests we’ve also added functionality to AppConnect to make it much easier to set lookup field values in a record from a dropdown of possible choices that we query dynamically from Insightly, including setting an opportunity pipeline or stage, or an opportunity, project or task category in a record using AppConnect.

Slide 5. Melinda to say: Anthony, the team invested heavily last year in bringing not only AppConnect to market. We also added a fourth product, Insightly Service, in September of last year. Please share what the team has done to enhance Insightly Service over the past several months. 

As I mentioned earlier, Insightly Service is our new helpdesk and ticketing product for managing customer support, and it includes a customer portal where you can publish knowledge articles and host community forums. It’s been a huge hit since we launched it, and we’ve added a large number of features to this product over the past few months.

Tickets

Let’s focus on ticket management in Insightly Service first. We’ve got a fantastic new mobile and tablet app for insightly Service that debuted recently on both Android and iOS, so now your team can answer tickets and respond to customers from anywhere, including the beach! It allows you to use macros to respond to customers quickly, has all the views and filtering and sorting from the web app, and it’s got all your dashboards and metrics so you can check in on the productivity of your team. You can get it from the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store, and just search for Insightly Service.

We’ve got comprehensive API Support for tickets in Insightly now, and we’ve just recently launched a CTI interface in Insightly Service, so you can integrate computer telephony services with Insightly like TalkDesk, RingCentral, 8×8, Five9, or Genesys. An example of this integration is called a screen pop – an action is when a new call comes into TalkDesk, the ability to automatically open a browser tab on the customer service agent’s computer with the Insightly Service App new ticket page open and already linked to the incoming call contact and organization and ready and waiting so the agent can quickly start typing in call notes while your on the call. It saves a lot of time and makes a connection between the phone system and Insightly Service that much more productive.

Speaking of agent productivity, we’ve made a number of enhancements to insightly Service to make agents lives just that little bit easier.

You can now at mention any agent within a ticket public reply or private note and that agent will be notified of that mention, much like how Slack or Twitter uses at mentions.

Another really handy feature is we now show in the app when other agents are viewing an individual ticket or responding to a ticket. This is really helpful when you have multiple customer service agents working on tickets at the same time and you don’t want one agent to respond to a customer if another agent is already responding. They can see the other agent is responding in real time, and move onto another ticket.

We added automated customer satisfaction surveys that can be sent to customers after a ticket has been solved, so you can gather feedback directly from customers to understand if you solved their problem and if they were satisfied with the service you provided. We track that by ticket and by agent so you can measure, report and chart customer satisfaction across several different dimensions to learn and improve the way you service your customers over time.

Slide 6 – Tickets continued

We’ve built additional capabilities around ticket merges based on customer feedback. Merging tickets together is now easier, and we provide more options on how the tickets are merged, and auto-generate and append notes on both the source and the destination ticket with details of the merge so you can better understand which tickets were merged where. You can now bulk-merge tickets together too.

We’ve also improved our processing of incoming emails to improve agent productivity in a few areas. We just launched a new AI powered SPAM detection system to automatically flag and send incoming SPAM emails directly to the SPAM queue, so your agents don’t have to manually send them to SPAM. 

Our new Auto-reply detection to process and hide incoming system generated emails like out-of-office replies or bounce replies or mailbox full notifications is excellent, so now agents are not notified or bothered when incoming replies to tickets are received from bots or other systems.

Finally on the agent productivity side, we now auto-hide repeated quoted reply text in messages so you can easily see the latest reply without the quoted responses to the previous 10 replies below it. We’ll hide them behind an ellipsis below the latest reply, and you can easily click the ellipsis to expand out those replies, similar to Gmail.

We’ve also added a few new dashboard cards and new Reports for Service tickets, and we’ll be adding a few more over time as well. 

A lot of our customers that have subscriptions to both Insightly CRM and Insightly Service have asked to be  able to display and share customer service tickets within the Insightly CRM product under the contacts and organization records they’re related to – and for CRM users like sales people to be able to view tickets and responses even if those users don’t have a license to Insightly Service. I’m pleased to let you know that we totally support that, and any user that has permissions to tickets can see tickets and they don’t need to purchase an insightly Service license for that user, so anyone in your organization can get a better understanding of every customer and any issues they have had just by checking Insightly.

Melinda: Insightly Service Knowledge Management

Slide 7. Anthony, the next area of focus for the team, with Insightly Service, has been updates to Knowledge Base. Please share what’s new here. 

 

We’ve added a few improvements to the knowledge base side of things too. We added the ability to move around and reorganize articles in bulk. We added new API end points for knowledge articles, and the ability to generate a table of contents automatically. You can now archive and unarchive knowledge articles in bulk, and we added a new last published date field to articles. Finally we added reporting for knowledge base articles.

 

Slide 8 – Melinda – We’ve added a new community management experience to Insightly Service so that our customers can have oversight to all aspects of the user community portals, and the Insightly team has been hard at work innovating on the customer portal.  Anthony, please talk about that. 

You can use it to organize, manage, and order community content like topics and posts, and moderate user comments, flag posts and comments as spam, or edit and clean up user posted content. 

We’ve added new settings for granular community moderation. You can choose to moderate and approve all community posts and comments before they become public, just those comments and posts that are auto-flagged by our AI as containing links or SPAM content, or leave it open and not moderate community content at all.

The portal can optionally include a new ticket form that your users fill out to create a new ticket in insightly Service. You can now customize that form to contain any custom fields you have on the ticket object, and exclude, include, and reorder any of the fields on that form.

We also added the ability to customize the 404 page for your portal too, along with all the other pages.

Slide 9 – Melinda: Anthony, let’s transition to what’s going on with Insightly Marketing. The Insightly Marketing team is really excited about getting more granular with our ability to segment and target. Please speak to these updates. 

Within your business’s base of customers, there are inevitably prospects, leads, and customers at different phases in their journey with you. The people who make up these groups are from a variety of places and have unique needs, traits, pain points, and expectations for your business in terms of communication, support, and more.

The key to creating and maintaining successful relationships with your business’s different customer groups is understanding their unique needs which helps you effectively and efficiently meet (and, hopefully, exceed) their expectations.

Segmenting your customer base and targeting a subsets of people with exactly the right communications or journey is now easier than ever in insightly Marketing because we include powerful new capabilities to segment by activity. 

You can now filter and segment your prospects in insightly Marketing by the emails you’ve sent them, the journeys they’ve completed, the forms they’ve submitted, or even the individual web pages they’ve viewed, links they’ve clicked, video’s they’ve viewed or the emails they’ve opened. Any activity in Insightly can now be used as a filter in dynamic or static lists so you target your customers in a very granular and refined way.

Email systems now often include security software that opens and scans every incoming email for malicious content and scams. Those automated bot email opens and clicks can cause issues for marketers in journeys and email analytics. Insightly Marketing now includes newly added AI based capabilities to detect and filter out these automated bot clicks and phantom opens so marketing journeys that branch off email opens or clicks work reliably, lead scoring is accurate, and email engagement analytics are correct. 

Slide 10 – Melinda – Anthony, the team has also been working on ways to not just improve Insightly CRM, but also the integration from Insightly CRM to Insightly Marketing.  Please share what’s new here. 

In the past 6 months we’ve invested heavily in the integration between Insightly Marketing and Insightly CRM to make it more seamless. One  initiative that came out of that that illustrates the power of combining Marketing data and CRM data together in the one platform is new capabilities we built into CRM Contact List filtering. You can now filter CRM contact and organization lists using filter criteria from insightly marketing prospects. So if you have specific fields within Insightly Marketing prospects, either standard fields or custom fields, that you would like to filter matching contacts on in the CRM side you can now do that. We’ll reach across to Insightly Marketing seamlessly and query those fields on the corresponding prospect and match them up for you automatically in real time.

We extended that same platform integration out to leads as well. So you can now filter your Leads in Insightly CRM by using filter criteria from Insightly Marketing prospects seamlessly in real time. 

We also enhanced list views for opportunities in insightly recently as well. You can now filter for opportunities by the associated organization fields the opportunity is associated with. If you want to see all opportunities in the Eastern States of America, you can now filter opportunities by the state address field associated with the organization for example.

Slide 11 – Quotes

We also improved the experience around quoting in Insightly CRM recently based on customer feedback and suggestions. Some of our customers have hundreds or even thousands of products they quote and sell, so we’ve made it a lot easier for them to find that specific product they want to add to a quote more quickly when generating quotes.

Customers told us they would like to search and filter across multiple fields to find the products they want to add to a quote. To enable that we brought in the exact same list filtering and search functionality we have in our standard list views, including the ability to filter by multiple fields and search within a list to find the exact product you want.

Customers also told us they have additional attributes they would like to add to their products that are specific to their industry, so we added the ability to support custom fields on quote products and quote line items, and to configure which fields are shown in the modals for managing quote products, and even extended out to adding those custom fields to quote templates when you generate new quotes to send them to customers, and supporting custom fields for quote products in our API.

We also added the ability to quickly clone a quote like you can other records within insightly, and emailing a quote to a contact will have that email appear under the linked opportunities activity. 

On the subject of emailing in Insightly CRM, we made it much easier to email linked contacts in opportunities, projects and organizations. For example, under the related tab for an organization you can see the list of contacts at that organization, and we now have a shortcut button right there to email all those contacts at once. 

Slide 12 – Melinda – Anthony, let’s move on to improvements that affect the entire platform, not just one specific application.

If you’ve got a big screen attached to your computer to view insightly you can setup Insightly to display multiple columns of data in detail views. Insightly would show you the number of columns that fit on your screen, but customers have asked us to be able to set a fixed number of columns, so we obliged and you can now set a fixed number of columns in the page layout for displaying the details of a record in Insightly.

A lot of customers like to save time by updating a whole set of records in bulk in one step. We made some improvement to the notifications you get when you bulk update records, and now when that operation is finished we now send you a convenient summary email detailing every record that was changed and any we skipped and more importantly why.

Everyone uses dashboards, and we made some small improvements at customer’s requests there too. Some users have a lot of different dashboards within their organization, so we now let you search the dashboard list to find the right dashboard amongst many. Some companies like to display their Insightly dashboards on TV’s in their office, so once you have those dashboards setup just how you want them, you can lock all the cards in position so they look just perfect on that big screen tv.

The number of Insightly apps customers use is growing, so we added a convenient little time saving feature that logs you back into the last app you were using. We also now keep a detailed login history of every login to the system for security purposes along with the date, time, location and IP address of the user, and you can access that information in a new Login history report.

On the subject of logs, our fantastic audit logging now includes logging changes to related links within the logs, so any changes made to the related tab of a record is now dutifully logged in the audit log for that record.

Slide 13 – Melinda – Anthony, this has all been really great. And I think we’re coming to the part of the webinar that might be most exciting for listeners. Give us a sneak peek into the details of a few new features that are in the final stages of development and will ship soon. 

Lookup Dropdown Control Improvements

One of the common form controls used in insightly is the lookup dropdown control, which allows you to associate a record with a record of another type, like a contact lookup dropdown on a task, or a user lookup dropdown on an opportunity. It’s used everywhere in Insightly and recently we made some big improvements to how it works to make you more productive entering information.

You can currently search within these dropdowns and we show a few search results to select from, but sometimes the record you want does not show up in those first few results. You now have the option to show all results and pick from a longer list of search results where we also show an expanded number of fields so you can better identify the record you’re looking for. A great example of this in action is where you have to choose a contact to associate a record to, and you have a long list of contacts with the same or very similar names. In the dropdown when you search we only show a few records  and just the name and one other value like the email address, but expanding this out to show all search results we will show you a couple of hundred contacts and additional contact fields like the contact’s address, organization, phone number, or even custom fields.

File Management System

Next up, users have been asking for what seems like forever to have a file management system built into Insightly for all the files we store. Well we listened, and we built a central place where you can list out all the files stored in Insightly, search them and order them as you would any other list by file size, category or any other field. You can bulk delete file attachments and generally clean them up, or make changes to them. 

Sandboxes

Some customers have complex needs they need to map to insightly, and making changes to  fields and objects or building out and testing sophisticated workflow automations is not something they feel comfortable doing on their live production instance. For them we’re going to ship a new feature called sandboxes that allows you to have a second test version of insightly where you try things out, experiment, and get an understanding of changes before you implement them in your production instance.

Object Level Search in the Top Search Box

This next feature is a little something we’re borrowing from Amazon. That search box smack bang in the center top center of every page of insightly is widely used for finding the record you’re looking for very quickly. Right now it searches every object type you’ve got in Insightly including contacts, organizations, opportunities, projects tasks and any custom objects and presents back the closest matches. Sometimes you already know what object type you’re looking for, just like you might know on Amazon if you’re looking for a book or electronics. We’re going to add a little dropdown to the left of the search box so you can choose the object type first, then when you start typing in your search we will suggest just the search results within that object type.

File Attachments on Custom Objects

We’ve got customers that have extended Insightly and made great use of custom objects to manage information about various parts of their business right from within Insightly. They can then create and edit and delete those records in Insightly from the web or our mobile apps, use our API to move records to and from other systems, report on that custom object data and graph and chart it using dashboards, and we even keep a full audit log history of all the changes.

But up until now you have not been able to add file attachments to records in those custom objects like you can with the standard Insightly objects like contacts, organizations or projects. We’re working on adding support for all sorts of file attachments on custom object records, so you can attach PDF’s or Word document to custom objects, blueprints or plans or contracts, or spreadsheets or images or even X-Rays or patient records because Insightly is 100% HIPAA Compliant.

 And combined with the new file management feature we’re also about to release you will be attaching and managing files against any record in insightly with ease.

Wrap Up

So that’s a breakdown of features we’ve released recently across the whole Insightly platform, and a preview of a few of our upcoming features we’ll be releasing in the next few weeks.

We moved our feature release program from four major releases of insightly per year up to 12 releases per year so we can debut new features for you every month. You can keep up to date with a comprehensive list of all the new features and enhancements we release each month and how to use them on our help center at support.insightly.com under the ‘What’s new’ section.

Slide 14 – Melinda – wrap up

Close out: Anthony, I want to thank you for taking the time to share what’s new with Insightly and what’s coming soon. I also want to remind everyone that a copy of this recording will be available on our website and emailed to you. Please don’t hesitate to share it with others in your organizations who may be interested or need to know more about what updates are being made to the platform. For anyone who asked a question, I’ll be sure to have our team reach out to you. And finally, if you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, either by phone or email.  Thank you for joining and have a great day. 

 

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