In addition to spending time engaging customers and prospects through Playbooks, reps spend a considerable amount of time in Gmail following up on emails, engaging new customers, etc. With the new Enhanced Gmail Integration, popular productivity features of Playbooks are now natively available directly from within Gmail. With these features, reps can be more productive than ever without leaving Gmail.
In this update, two Playbooks features are being made available within Gmail:
Playbooks Email Templates: To help a rep compose an email more quickly, reps can now pull Playbooks Email Templates into the Gmail compose experience.
Playbooks Email Snippets: To help reps customize an email on the fly, reps can now use Email Snippets while composing an email in Gmail.
Additional Playbooks functionality will be introduced to the Gmail email experience in upcoming releases.
Getting Started:
- There is no configuration required to begin using the new Playbooks productivity features in Gmail.
- Only customers that connect their Gmail account to Playbooks will see this functionality.
- A user must be logged into Playbooks for these features to appear in Gmail.
Local Calling Rule Compliance (Beta)
With the rise of modern sales engagement technologies, it is more important than ever for organizations to ensure that their engagement efforts are both compliant and responsive to regional events. For example, a sales team should probably not make phone calls into a state or region when there are ongoing natural disasters – such as what occurred recently in Texas within the United States. Alternatively, states may have different rules or regulations around when sales calls are allowed, like in Utah on a local holiday called Pioneer Day.
The new Local Calling Rule Compliance capabilities of Playbooks help ensure that sales teams stay compliant with organizational guidelines around when it is not permissible to make calls.
How It Works:
An administrator can create calling rules based on states and zip-codes. When a rep attempts to make a phone call, Playbooks checks the record against the rules. If the record qualifies for a rule, the phone call is blocked and the rep is informed. For example, if a company configured no calls to be allowed into Texas due to state of emergency, if a rep attempts to call a record in Texas the call will be blocked.
When this feature leaves beta, an administrator will need to configure the rules that are applied to the phone calls reps are making. To do this, an administrator will:
- Log in to the Playbooks Manager Tool
- Click the Settings tab
- Click the Calls menu, then click “Outbound Calls”
Other Things to Know:
- No local calling rules are enforced upon the release of this feature. This means that to begin using this feature, organizations will need to create the rules for Playbooks to enforce.
- In the beta release of this feature, organizations will need to contact their XANT Customer Success Manager to setup relevant dialing rules.
- This feature only supports records that are located in the United States.
Updated User Management
Managing Playbooks users in the Manager App has been overhauled. These changes are designed to make it easier to add users, edit users, and gain additional visibility into license usage.
Changes to User Management
- Combination of People and Teams: The People tab has been removed, and all people functionality has been moved to the Teams page. On the teams page, a user can switch between viewing teams, or viewing a full list of people.
- Mass Updating Users: Administrators can now mass update users across multiple teams. This allows administrators greater flexibility around making changes to large sets of users with a single action.
- Adding Users: Administrators will continue to add users from the Teams page. Administrators now gain insight into how many available licenses. Administrators can select multiple users in the CRM to import into Playbooks.
Other Things to Know:
- The “People” tab in the manager app has been removed. Functionality from that page has been moved to the Teams tab.
Improved Sandbox Management
Administrators can now more easily manage their Playbooks testing sandboxes. These changes include:
- Prior to this change, a license was consumed for every user on a sandbox. With this change, additional licenses are not consumed for sandboxes. What this means is that a single license is used, across as many Playbooks orgs as needed.
- When a user or administrator logs in to either Playbooks or the manager app, if they are part of multiple accounts (sandboxes), they will be prompted to select which account they are logging into.
Getting Started:
- When an administrator or user logs into to Playbooks or the Playbooks Manager, if they are part of multiple orgs, they will be automatically prompted to select the account they are trying to login to.
- If a user is not part of multiple Playbooks accounts, they will instantly be logged into their Playbooks account.
If you are interested in learning more about Playbooks sandboxes, please contact your account manager.
Other Product Updates
- Administrators can now set how long an inbound call should route in a Rep Queue before moving forward in a Call Path.
- Users can now save blank signatures.
