Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Josh Hernandez. And today, I am going to be going over some of the options you have on the contact management screen as far as seeing what information displays at a glance when you go to that screen, as well as adding or importing contacts. Let’s look at the topics we’ll use today. The first three are going to be adding contacts, importing, exporting contacts, and printing contacts. And then we’ll go into the columns of contact information that display on the screen. So I am going to just leave this full screen mode and go into Flex MLS. And we’ll talk about adding contacts first. And so I’ve kind of combined all three of these on the same topic, adding contacts, importing, exporting contacts. So let’s just take a look at what that process looks like. Now, hopefully, you’re familiar with this. Excuse me. I clicked on quick search. What I meant to click on was contact management. Once I’ve clicked on contact management, I’m going to come to this screen. I see a list of all of my contacts. And the first thing we’ll talk about is adding contacts. And you’ll notice on my screen, right up at the top to the far right of my contacts on that very top row, add a contact. And that’s where you go to manually add a contact. I can type in the name as I want it to appear.
If maybe I want first name and last name, I can break the name apart. So I could give a first, middle, and last name and have first and last broken out. If I wanted to put in additional information, a spouse or significant other, I could put them in here as well.
And then I could complete the information on the screen. One thing that I like to point out when adding contacts, especially now, is that if I add a phone number and I’d like to send them listings via text message when I’m in a quick search on the full website, I want to put in a mobile phone number here as well. That option when you’re on the quick search screen and you see that option at the top that says share, and it gives you an option to text listings, you’ll wanna make sure that you have that mobile number filled out. Now you can do it from that process. We’ll have another webinar coming up specifically on how to text listings from desktop. But just to point out that mobile number, if you plan to just go to a search screen, find listings for this contact, and text it to them, make sure you fill in the mobile number. It’ll save you a step later on down the road. And then I’ll click, of course, to add that contact. Now I can come back in and I can edit that contact at any point in time. I just click on the edit contact. Once you click on the contact and look at their contact detail card, edit contact. So I could always come in and put in additional information here. I have notes or addresses. I’m gonna cancel that for right now. The reason I brought up adding a contact, and we’ll just spend that couple of minutes, but because I think most people are familiar with that, is because sometimes when I’m demonstrating on screen, I have this blue bar at the top of contact management that says quick add. First name, last name, email address. Do I want to invite that contact to the portal and add?
So I could come in here and give a first name, last name, an email address, and then I click this box that’ll invite them to the portal as soon as I click on add. So I have this quick add, and sometimes when I use that quick add, now you’ll see it brings up the contact card as normal. If I close this, I’d be able to search and find them. John Johnson right down here, this is the one we just went in and added. Find them as normal. But if you look at contact management and say, I don’t have that quick add bar, it’s because at some point in time you may have clicked on this little upward arrow that’s in purple where my mouse is hovering. And when you click that, it goes away.
But this brings us into the other functions we’re going to talk about. So how do I get that quick add back? Or how do I hide it? I just showed you how to hide it. But if you want it back, go to advanced. So that is on the top row of my contact management screen, the very far right. And then you’ll notice as I scroll down, second option from the bottom says show hide quick add. And that just brings that back. So if I click that little purple upward arrow and remove it, I can always bring it back by coming down to advanced, show hide quick add. So since it’s already hidden, it’ll automatically show when I click, and now it’s back. So if you want that quick add now, of course, when you’re actually emailing or saving a search for a contact, you always have the ability to add a contact on the fly and they will appear here in your contact management. So you’re not limited to just using this screen to add contacts or using the quick add. You can always do that when you’re working in the system as well.
I’m going to come back out from here and now we’ll talk about importing and exporting contacts. Because sometimes you might say, well, I have a separate CRM program that I use.
I’ve gotten several people in Flex MLS where I’ve added them. So how do I export my contacts? And it’s going to be in the same place where we found this quick add under advanced. And right here, I’ll see import, and underneath that, export contacts.
So when I click on contacts, export contacts, it actually opened up in another screen. I’ve got two monitors going. So it exports them in a CSV file. So you’ll see primary name, primary email. Top row will just have all of the columns of information labeled and then all of the information.
So you’ll be able to take this CSV file, and then you’ll be able to open up your separate CRM program that you use and import this file that you’ve just downloaded. So again, if I want to export all of these contacts I have to use in a separate program, I go to advanced and I export those contacts. Now maybe I have contacts in Gmail or another email program that I use. And in that program, I’d like to take those contacts and bring them into Flex MLS. You can do that as well.
You would just have to go to that separate program and use the commands for that program. It has help screens, I’m sure, to create an export and export your contacts. And I actually did that earlier here. I just created a CSV file. We’ll open it up and take a look at it. I just have three contacts in here, first name, last name, email, phone number. Because people often have questions, how do I import those contacts? What does that process look like? So let’s take a look and see what that process actually looks like. I’ve got a separate CSV file right here that I already downloaded from another program. I go to advanced in FlexMLS and I click import contacts. And then I would find that file here, choose file. I’ve got it saved on my desktop right here, exported contacts example. That’s this file. So I’m just going to double click on that. I saved it already as a CSV file, but if you’ve saved it as something else, you have tab and pipe here as options as well. And then I’m going to click this button that says upload file. Once I click on this, this gives me a nice description of what the display name is, how does the mapping work. And in this document that I had opened previously, I had a column header. So right at the bottom, I’m going to say get rid of the column headers when I import that. And then field one, first name, that’s what the name of the column is, and it gives me that example of Aaron. What does that map to? And I’m going to map that into not the display name, but the contact’s first name. Since my export had it broken down into first name, last name, I’ll break this down into first name, last name. Same thing with email address. I’m gonna say that goes to email. Phone number, does this map to their primary phone number? Does it map to their mobile number? And I’m just going to bring this into their primary phone number. And then I click on continue, and it will tell me it skipped that first row, so it didn’t import that first row because that was just headers, first name, last name. And then it tells me the ones that successfully loaded. If there’s somebody that didn’t successfully load, I could go and look at it in the file, maybe maybe manually add them if there’s something wrong on the record. I could print a report for this just to give myself a record or just click on done, which I’ll do now.
And when I go into contact management, I’m going to be be able to search for them. There was Erin at the top of my list. We just imported Erin. That’s one of those records that was brought in. Now, of course, it only had first name, last name, email, and phone number.
You can always further edit the contact by just coming down and clicking edit contact, and I could add additional information.
So again, I’ll add that mobile number so I’ll be able to text this contact listings later. And then I’ll click on save. The last thing we’ll do before we get to customizing these columns of information that display is going to be sometimes people say, well, I want to print addresses. I want to send out flyers. I want to send out promotional material. Under prints, again, right next to advanced where we were, just to the left, says print. I could print my contacts, but what I want to do is print mailing labels. And so then I, it asks, are you printing home address or office address? My contacts, I’ll just have the home address. Do you want I want the name how it displays as the display name or the full name, first, middle, last. And do I want to have these sorted first name ascending or last name ascending? Maybe I want that last name ascending. And then I can click and print labels. And it’s going to give me a CSV file that I’ll be able to do a mail merge with and print those labels. So I could print labels, I could download the file, so then I can do my mail merge. But I’m just going to return to contact manager. So printing mailing labels is right under print. Sometimes people are curious about that as well.
And that takes us through adding contacts, importing, exporting contacts as a way to mass add, and printing those contacts. The last couple of minutes, we’ll talk about customizing the way those columns of information display. Usually when we talk about contact management, we come in and we’re looking at specific contacts. So we’re looking at their activity in a lot of our webinars and viewed listings and their searches and their portal. But what I’m interested in today is customizing these columns of information. Right now I have portal, when they were last active, when did they last look at listings, last match, when did their search turn up a match most recently, how many listings has their search turned up, how many emails have they unread or unread, not read. To customize these columns of information, we’re going to go back to that advanced column, and the very last option will be customized contact list. So I’ll click on advanced, customize our contact list, And this is a little bit of an older screen in FlexMLS.
So the way to look at this is in this second half, right beneath the line where my mouse is currently moving back and forth, this bottom section tells me that there there there’s the name and the activity column. Those will always be there. You can’t get rid of those. But I could say, I don’t really use the portals with my contacts. I could click that x and get rid of it. Or subscription, when did that subscription last match? Or have they been sent emails and they have unread messages? And if I want to add more, that is the box at the top where I could say, I always want to see that contact’s phone number when I log in. So I’ll click on phone. I click here, you’ll see it gets added as the last column, but you just use those arrows to move it to the left, move it to the right. And again, name and activity will always be there. Date created. I added date created.
I think this is a very useful one once you’ve been in the system several years, you have a lot of contacts that you’ve used. And so maybe you just wanna go through and kind of clean up things. If there’s contacts that I have in from ten years ago, I wanna make sure they’re deactivated or I could even remove them or just keep them at the bottom of the list. So I could put date created here as well. I can put in any of these options. I can change how does the name appear. Right now I’ve got first name, last name. I can click that last name, first name, or the display name, which can combine those together when you enter that in manually. But I’m just going to go first name, last name for right now. And then anytime I’ve added or removed options from this, our our columns of information, I just go all the way to the bottom and click save changes. So now I’ve got our name, our activity. I added the phone, last match for their subscription here, unreads, and the date created. Now when you come in here, maybe I log in to FlexMLS or I came back from doing a search and I go to contact management, by default, it’s sorting by my most active contacts. And that’s just to help you recognize what contacts you have that have been looking at listings. And that activity, as you’ve heard before, it’s from manual emails, those automatic, those subscription emails, as well as if they use the portal, if they are signed into my portal looking at their account and looking at listings, running their own searches, all of that counts toward contact activity. So I know who’s been looking at contacts. But like I said, maybe I want to come in. I’ve got a lot of old contacts here. I’m looking about who can I make sure is deactivated or maybe I wanna get rid of some? You can click on these column headers.
I’ll click on date created, and now you’ll see it’s sorted most recent to least recent. Aaron Anson, Chris Christensen, Brian Igham, those are the ones we just added by importing them. So they’re at the very top. If I click that again whoops. I guess that will just always create our have our most recently added at the top. So it won’t reverse that order. But if I scroll down to the bottom, I can see all of my older contacts that are here as well.
The very last thing and the last one minute that I’ll leave you with is when I’m working with a contact and I’m no longer working with them, I have several options. If I want to keep their information here so I can revisit them in the future, maybe Ryan Patterson, for example. I’m no longer working with Ryan. We work together just very briefly.
As I’m looking at Ryan, I can see there’s no activity, no active searches, no portal. What options do I have to get rid of him? If I want to keep Ryan in my contacts but just make sure if there was a search here or if there was a portal, I could just deactivate everything. So if he ever comes back, we ever start talking, I can reactivate Ryan or just deactivate by clicking on the contact record, deactivate. So if he uses the portal or has active automatic email updates, I just deactivate that. Now Ryan doesn’t actually have anything there.
I’ll click on his name to bring Ryan back up. A couple other options I do have, transfer. Right next to deactivate, I see a transfer option. That allows me to send this contact and their saved searches to another member of the MLS. I would not do that unless I know I’ll never work with Ryan Patterson again for whatever reason, or maybe I’m retiring and I’m just giving, people from my portfolio to somebody else, I could transfer those. Because once I transfer a contact, I can’t just retract them and get them back. That actually allows me to transfer them to another agent. So I could come in and send that to another agent and click on transfer, but I can’t get them back. So I generally don’t see people use that. And, of course, our very last option, if I wanted to remove a contact permanently, I click on remove. And, that would remove them so they no longer appear in my contact list at all. If there were saved searches with that contact I wanted to include while removing them, I could do that as well. And then I’ll just click that remove option, and that would permanently remove. Now Ryan is no longer in my list. So that was also removing, transferring, or just deactivating a contact. And deactivating is what I usually recommend because then the contact stays here. If I start working with them a few years in the future, I can just come back and look and see what we were doing last time, and I can start developing their record again. Now that concludes what we had for today. Just a quick review of everything we talked about, adding contacts along with the quick add, import export, as well as printing contacts, and then customizing those columns of contact information by going to advanced and customizing that contact list. And remember, it’s the second half of the screen that says these are the columns that will display. Use the forward backward arrows to change the order of the columns, remove a column with the x, and add new columns. I’ll do last met modified, date created, last modified by just selecting them from the list on top. Anytime you do that, click on save changes. Now I’ll just take a quick pause. That does conclude everything we had wanted to discuss today. I see there is a question. Before I leave, I want to answer this question because it is a very common question. Is there a way to mass delete contacts?
I clicked on last modified, and I’ve got all of these contacts I’m no longer working with. Can I mass get rid of them? I’m going to show you because it’s not intuitive. So I’m going to start with maybe Greg James, and I’ll delete three contacts at once. Start by holding down your control key and then start selecting contacts. Now you’ll see I have four selected. Start. Make sure you hold your control key before you begin selecting, and then I can click remove, and I can mass remove contacts.
There’s not a way to mass transfer contacts, only remove.
You’ll see when I hold down that control key and start selecting multiple contacts, the only option when multiple are selected is removed. So fantastic question. Glad to demonstrate that as well.
I see if there’s there’s a question, can I mass select contacts to deactivate them? And you cannot mass deactivate contacts. So I can manually click on a single contact to deactivate, but I cannot mass deactivate contacts.
Alright. Thank you everyone for attending today. Thank you, and have a great rest of your day.
