One question we often receive is “how can I link smrtPhone to multiple workspaces and multiple apps?”
There’s a very good reason why smrtPhone connects to one contact app, but that doesn’t leave you out in the cold. Here are some best practices to use when linking across either multiple workspaces or multiple apps.
Upgrade Your Unified Contacts App
It’s important to have a unified contacts app that can move across different apps. For example, we have a contacts app where we can link any number of properties which have seller leads or dispositions, any number of offers or buyer profiles, because one person can be multiple things.
The last thing we want to do is have duplicate people across your system because we’re using it across different apps. We want everything to aggregate to the one contact. Because of this, it’s very important for you to have one integrated contacts app, and then be able to link all your different workspaces up to that one unified contacts app.
This works both for pushing up communications across different apps and also working across different workspaces, where you potentially have one contact where you are sharing two different workspaces contextually based on passing a lead from one agent to another.
Update Your Communications Log
It is important to solidify what to do every time a communication is logged. What we normally do is upgrade our communications app with a section called ‘related items.’ There, we have relationship links to a user’s app, a phone numbers app, related properties, transactions, buyer profiles, everything. This is connecting our communications app with a forward relationship to each of those sub apps. These are places that we want to push our communications down.
When a new communication is logged, take a look at the communication. For example, we look to see if a contact has been added automatically by smrtPhone. Then we reach out into that contact to determine what other elements of our system are attached to that contact so that we can push them down. In the call communication log, we are immediately linked to the correct user. We linked to the phone number and we’re pushing down to a related property. Now that related property is specifically brought in from the contact we have ‘William Smart’ related to that property. Therefore, we’re updating this communication to push that down. This works really well for both pushing communications down contextually to the different potential apps you have to control business processes like seller leads, dispositions, offers, buyer profiles, but it also works the exact same principle to do it.
If you want to work across different workspaces or you want to place calls and write it down because agents are working in different apps, in different workspaces for privacy circumstances, they all can work, but they all rely on that initial contacts app, having relationships to the other parts of your system.
How Does this All Work in Action?
Now finally, let’s see this in action. Here, I’m on a seller properties app where ‘William’ is the seller. I’m going to make a call to William and then going straight back into Podio. I can see on this property lead itself, the call is logged immediately there.
Now, how does that happen? If I click forward towards that communication, we’ll see that when the call was logged, we have done everything we did in step two, right? We linked to the user, we linked the number and we found the related property by going out to William’s contact and linking it. You’ll also see in the comments log that there’s a comment that says the system didn’t find a related transaction. We usually use those breadcrumbs so that we know which type of information we have linked to and which ones we haven’t.
For instance, if we have four apps and it’s a linear process, we can say we found A, we found B, but we didn’t find C or D. That gives the agents and the users an easy way of identifying what is going on. And of course you can also mention people, or you can push this down so that they can see it directly, where they need to see it.
This kind of setup is very easy to do. Any one of our smrtPhone partners can help you out very quickly. It’s not particularly complicated, but the key to it is having that unified contacts app. We always make sure that our unified contacts app has all of our sellers, buyers and our realtors. This way, we can simply use logic to push down the communications to different parts of the system. For example, if I have a buyer in there, I’m possibly pushing the communication down to the buyer profile, but I’m also pushing it down to the different properties that they have in our system that they’re putting bids on.
In summary, it’s crucial to have a unified app and to adjust your communications app so that you can link those two processes together. It’s easy to link every single communication you have logged by smrtPhone across your system. It works great across workspaces. It works great across apps.
