Good morning, everybody. My name is Josh Hernandez. And today, we are going to take a look at how to invite your clients to use your portal in Flexmls. So just a few things before we begin. I’m gonna change my screens.
And on your screen right now, you should see an outline of what we’ll discuss today. So this is going to be a quick fifteen minute coffee break webinar, and we are going to look at three different ways to invite your clients to use the portal in Flexmls. The first two ways we’re going to look at are on the full website.
In Flexmls web, if you have an existing contact out there and they’ve already got a search, maybe they even have a subscription, how do you invite them to use the contacts or your client portal? The second way we’ll look at in Flexmls web is brand new contacts.
If you’re adding a contact or maybe you’re saving a search and you haven’t even added the contact yet, how do you invite those brand new contacts to use the portal? It doesn’t have to be done from contact management. You can actually do it when saving the search. And then finally, we’re going to take a look at Flexible S Pro, the mobile app.
And we’re going to look at how to send a portal invitation from the contact screen on the app. I am going to now move over to my other screen. Just give that one second.
And now you should be able to see my screen inside FlexMLOS. Before we begin today, as I mentioned, this is being recorded. We’ll send you that recording in approximately twenty four hours. Additionally, since this is just a quick coffee break webinar, if you have more questions on what exactly is the portal, how do I go in and change important portal preferences?
What are the advantages of using a portal instead of just using a subscription? You can go to your guided help or even go just to the help option over here on the right where my mouse is. When you click on that, you’re going to see there is a video training page.
Now over the past couple of months, we’ve done a few webinars dedicated specifically for portals. So on this video training page, just type in the word portal in that search bar at the top.
And you’re going to see back on December fourth, we did portals one zero one, a quick thirty minute video that introduces you to what can your clients do in the portal that they don’t get with just a subscription, How they can save listings, how they can run their own searches, that sort of thing. That’s a good overview of using portals.
Last month, we did five tips for effective portals where we looked at some portal preferences and different settings in FlexMLESS that you can use to customize and control your portals and make them even more efficient.
And today, we’re just going to look at how do I invite clients to use the portals? I’ve seen the other videos. I’ve been using the portal. I just want to make sure that I’m not missing out on any ways that I could be doing, in inviting contacts to use my portal more efficiently. So inside FlexMLOS, I’m going to start with looking at an existing contact.
So I will go to contact management and I am going to look at Alicia Nelson here. Now as I’m looking at Alicia on the contact management screen, I’ll zoom in a little bit and make this slightly bigger. As I’m looking at Alicia, I see that her portal is currently off.
So when I click on her contact record, even though she may have a search and subscription already, and if I click on this search and subscription tab, I’ll see that she does have a search. She is getting updates for that search, but she told me she’d like to be able to keep track of her favorite listings when she receives those updates.
She’d like to be able to search the internet for or search the MLS rather, not the internet. Search the MLS for additional listings that aren’t inside that search criteria that I created for her. So she can do that through the portal. I want to invite her to use the portal. Click on that portal tab. On this page, I have two things that I need to do to invite her to the portal.
Number one, her client portal is currently off. I just click on on, that turns the portal on. And then I click invite to portal. This will send the portal invitation.
Now I’m going to click on this And when I do, I actually see the portal invitation message come up.
Now in the other webinars that I talked about, this default message is controlled under your portal preferences. So when I send a portal invitation using the full website, this is a default message that’s already standard in the system, but I could customize that under portal preferences. Or if I wanna modify it just for Alicia, before I send this, I can put that in here.
I can customize that. It’s going to contain my business card. Once I’m ready with that message, I just click on send. Now we’ll take a look at the end of class here to see what Alicia has actually received from me.
I’m going to go ahead right now and just click on close. And so that’s one way from the contact management screen that I can invite one of my existing contacts who’s already in the system to use the portal. How can I invite them if they’re a brand new contact? From contact management, if I’m just adding a contact on the fly, you’ll notice I’ve got a quick add bar right at the top.
If you don’t see that quick add bar, there is an advanced option right here where it has show, hide, quick add. So you can click to show or hide this little blue bar at the top.
And we can call this Ed Norton. Go ahead, give him an email address.
And if I want to invite him to use the portal when I add him on this screen, you can click that checkbox and then I click on add. Now Ed was going to receive that invitation to the portal. He won’t actually oh, no. He won’t actually, have a search inside that portal, but he’ll be able to create his own searches until I provide a search for him. So that portal does allow that option for him to just search the MLS.
He can’t save those searches, but he can enter the information he’s in looking for into that search. So I can do that when doing a quick add. I could also do that if I’m on a search screen, maybe I’m working with a brand new prospect and I enter in their search criteria. I’m not going to spend any time talking about what I’m doing as far as entering the search criteria today.
I’m just going to enter in some basic information with the list price, the total bedrooms, the total bathrooms, that sort of thing that we might be looking for.
And when I’m ready to save this search, maybe I am working with Alonzo and he’s not even in my contacts yet, but I want to invite Alonzo to use the portal and have this search that I just created with this list price, four hundred to six hundred thousand, West Fargo, four bedrooms, three bathrooms. I want him to be able to see that search in the portal as well as create his own searches.
So I am just going to begin by reviewing the listings, make sure those are the listings that I want to see. When I’m sure those are the results that I want in the search for Alonzo, I go up to my actions at the top, and I’m going to click on save.
Click on save search, and then I just enter a search name.
And when I I have the contact option here, I could enter the search description above. It’s optional. I’m just going to go to my contact. Alonzo is not an existing contact. So if I click on existing and type in his name, he’s not there. So I can add Alonzo on this screen.
And when I add Alonzo, I just need his name, his email address, and then there’s an option. Since I’m adding him right now, just like the quick add on the contact management screen, I can turn on the portal for him. And if I turn the portal on, I do have to take that second click right here, invite them to the portal. You’ll notice here I cannot customize that message.
It’s just going to send that default portal invitation from my portal preferences. So this won’t be customized. It will not say hello, Alonzo or anything like that. It will just go with that default invitation from my portal preferences. If I wanted to save the search and add a subscription, I could click this option. But maybe I don’t want to set up the subscription. I’m just going to click on save for Alonzo.
And when I go back to contact management, I can see that Alonzo is in here. And if I go to his portal tab, I’ll see that it’s on. He’s already received the invitation. Once he starts looking in the portal, reviewing the search that I saved for him or searching for his own listings and saving them, I’m going to be able to see what he’s doing inside the portal.
I can also see the searches that he is creating. So those are a couple of ways that we can turn on the portal and invite a brand new contact to use the portal as I’m adding them. From here, I am going to move in to Flexmls Pro, the app.
And I am actually just going to bring up my phone. Give me one moment.
I’ll bring this over onto the screen and a phone. I’ve got my Flexmls Pro app already here. And when I tap on that, it’ll log me in. And to invite clients to the portal, I can’t do it when I’m adding a search. I have to do it in contacts. So just like from the contact management screen in Flexmls, this is where I do it inside Flexmls Pro.
Now I’m using an iPhone, so you’ll see my menu at the bottom of the screen. If you’re using an Android or if you’re using the mobile website, this menu will be at the top of your screen. It will have a contacts icon. Just tap on that.
And on iPhone, if I scroll down, I’m going to see contacts who are not currently using the portal. They have never been invited. So I see I have a little group right here where it says send invitation. On iPhone, I see that send invitation option right here on the contact list. On Android, I won’t see that on the list. Instead, I would see that when I tap on the contact themselves.
I’ll tap on I’ll tap on Gordon. And on Gordon’s record, I’m going to also see the option send invitation. Now whenever I see that green send invitation button on iPhone, on Android, it’s going to be blue and it will say send invitation. That’s the invitation to use the portal. So to invite Ryan to use the portal, all I have to do is tap send that invite.
When I tap on that, you’ll notice it does not use the same default portal invitation from the full website. This stores on your app whatever you typed in last time on your previous portal invitation. So your app portal invite functions independently from the full website. It does not use what’s in your portal preferences. Instead, it remembers what you sent last time.
So in this case, I’m going to personalize that. I had had sent it to Anthony previously. Here, I would want to make sure to remove that, put in Gordon if I would like, or you could not put in somebody’s name, entirely. So you could just leave that out. So you could always leave that. You’ll see I wrote this intro email, this portal invitation, back last month.
It stored that from one month ago. I can change that to whatever I would like. I just wanted to illustrate that. It does store that.
So I am going to now click on email invitation and that emails out to Gordon.
So now Gordon has received that invitation to use the portal. The very last thing that I want to conclude with after showing you how to invite somebody from contact management and the full website, from the saved search on the full website, or from the contact record inside Flexible S Pro is very quickly, what does my contact see when they get that portal invitation?
So I am going to go to Alicia Nelson here.
I’m gonna open a brand new window and we’re going to take a look at Alicia’s inbox. So I’m going to come up here.
And all of my contacts that I’ve demonstrated with today received this portal invitation. I’m just showing you Alicia’s.
And this is when I had previously today before I started invited her to use subscriptions. This is her actual inbox. You can’t see your client’s inbox. This is her email inbox. This is the portal invitation that we just sent, ten minutes ago at the very beginning of the webinar. This is the customization that I did from the full website. I typed in her name, the message.
All she has to do is click on sign up. Now when she comes out to the portal I’m gonna zoom in on my screen just a little bit. To log in the first time, she just follows the prompts on the screen, clicks on log in. It has her name as the username already here. It just uses her email address, has her name in. She sets her own password and then clicks on confirm.
Once she does that, now she can use the portal. She can create her own searches as allowed by your MLS. She can view any searches that I’ve saved for her. And it also has the newsfeed. So if there is a subscription update that I have for her, she’ll see her new listings in that newsfeed.
That concludes what I wanted to present today for inviting contacts to use the portal from any platform, Flexible S web or Flexible S pro, and how to do that for an existing contact or how to do that for a brand new contact. We’ve had Amy on the line answering questions.
I’ll just check to make sure we don’t still see have any outstanding here.
Alright. I want to thank everybody for attending today. Have a great day and we will send you this recording in approximately twenty four hours.
