Product Release Notes - September 2021

Welcome to our release notes for September ‘21. Our Engineering Team has been so busy that we needed a second set of release notes for this month. These notes, published monthly, detail the enhancements and new features we’ve released. Continuous improvement is our focus, as always.

ACTIVE SCHEDULING

Verified User

We are super excited to announce the release of the Verified User functionality. This is something that our existing customers wanted and we believe this opens up the possibility of expanding Kronologic to even more meeting automation! In a nutshell, this function allows any user with an email id (only Microsoft or Google email ids) to create a Kronologic account. When a user does this, they also provide “Read only” access to their primary calendar associated with this email id.

Why is this such a big deal? When a user from a Kronologic customer organization uses Kronologic to schedule meetings, Kronologic has access to the Users’ calendar and proposes meetings which factor in the Users’ availability. However, the user is typically trying to set up a meeting with a  prospect whose calendar access, Kronologic does not have. Kronologic needs some interaction from the prospect, to understand their schedules better.

However, many of our existing large customers find Kronologic so useful for scheduling meetings, that they schedule meetings with their colleagues in the same organization and also with people from their other organizations, outside sales situations. For instance, one of our largest customers has a number of channel partners that they work with and have frequent meetings with people in the Channel Partner companies. In these cases, the meeting guest is willing to share their calendar.

If Kronologic has access to the meeting guest’s calendar as well, then Kronologic can propose meeting time slots which are available for both parties from the very first time.

To enable this, we have launched the “Verified User” feature. This will ensure that Kronologic will get the meeting right almost every time, first time. Of course, our meeting accepts rates will sky-rocket up.

To do this, anybody who is willing to share their calendar can create a “Verified User” account in Kronologic, and Kronologic as usual, will silently take care of the rest in the background. The verified user is only required to provide “Read Only” access to their calendar. Kronologic only reads availability information from the verified users’ calendar.

Pretty convenient, we think. (what do you think? Let us know at feedback@kronologic.ai)

So the next question is, How do I get my regular contacts a “Verified User” account with Kronologic? Pretty simple, actually. All you have to do is to send them a link to the login page of Kronologic which you regularly use. If you are already logged into Kronologic, you can get the link by just logging out of Kronologic and getting the link of the address bar in your browser. Logging out of Kronologic will take you to the Sign-in page.

In the sign-in page, you will find the link “New! Create a verified personal account”. 

Click on that link and you will be presented with with the following page:

Choose Google or Microsoft email id and login into your account with the right credentials. After the standard warning about allowing access (remember, you are giving Kronologic only read permissions to your calendar, so we can find out when you are busy/free is all), you can see your Kronologic profile.

Click “Update” and  you are good to go! Kronologic can now get “Read Only” access to the calendar associated with this email id, and whenever somebody tries to schedule a meeting through Kronologic with this email id, it will take the availability in this calendar into account, as well.

As you can see, you can disable the “read only” access any time that you choose.

In a sales situation, if you can get your prospective customer to share calendar availability with you, then getting a meeting confirmed is practically guaranteed. With a 30 second authorization, your prospect can now allow you to choose the optimum time for both the prospect and you - making the life of your favourite prospect just a little easier. You don’t have to get your prospect to choose from 16 slots over the next week, so you can sell something to them !!! (like some of our competitors make your prospects do)

Handle "Undeliverable email replies"

When users try to schedule a meeting with invalid contact email addresses, Kronologic now automatically cancels the meeting, if an “undeliverable” response is detected.

In earlier versions, Kronologic did not auto-cancel the meetings, leaving it to the user to take the appropriate corrective action. However, we see from our users’ behavior that many campaigns have a number of invalid email addresses and typically, these meetings are abandoned. We have now changed Kronologic behavior to automatically detect email “undeliverable” responses and cancel the meetings, so we mimic our users’ behavior.

When a contact email id is invalid and there is an “Undeliverable” mail response, the user can see the status of the meeting as “Cancelled” in the Instances page. If the user opens the Instance details page, they can see the extract from the “Undeliverable” response to the meeting invitation.

In addition to the above, Kronologic user also gets a detailed email in his inbox with the reason why the mail was not delivered.

OPERATIONS

Types Tag Automation

The next step in Kronologic’s journey in Tag Automation is on the Meeting Types. As you may know already, meeting types in Kronologic can be assigned tags, which can be then used to segment, organize and filter meeting types. However, if you wanted to assign tags to Instances created with a particular meeting type or if you wanted to assign a specific tag to contacts associated with a meeting type, this can be done using the tag automation feature.

This feature can be used in multiple ways to save time - for instance, a user needs to upload a few hundred contacts through the CSV upload feature, associate these contacts with a meeting type and then automatically get Kronologic to create instances for each of these contacts. The user also wants to tag these contacts with a unique tag for later identification. In this case, the user has  to locate the specific meeting type in the Meeting Types page and auto tag the contacts with the desired tag. All new contacts associated with this meeting type will hereinafter be tagged.

On the Meeting Types page, a separate tab called “Auto Tag” is available now:

In the Auto Tag tab, click on any of the Tag Icon to pull out the Tags Drawer

From the Tags Drawer, any tag can be created / removed / assigned, as required.

User Management - Bulk Upload Time zone and Availability

We have added some time saving utilities in the User Management page. It is now possible to select multiple users and assign availability for those users at one shot.

In the User Management page, there are a set of blue buttons on the top row - the third is “Update Schedulers”.

A set of more than one users can be selected in the user table below, and on clicking this button, the days of the week available for scheduling and the start time and end time for each of those days can be set for all the selected users at one shot (as shown below)

A very similar functionality has been provided for updating time zones for a set of users.

Select a set of users and click on the “Update Timezone” button:

Now, select any desired time zone and on clicking the Update button, the selected time zone will be applied to all the selected users (the number of selected users are displayed on the left)

We continually improve our product based on your feedback. If you would like to provide insights in a short interview, please contact feedback@kronologic.ai.

Welcome to the September ‘21 Product Release Notes from Kronologic! The Product Release notes which are released at approximately once per month, detail the enhancements and new features & functions we released since the last Product Release Notes (Product Release Notes June ‘21) - as a product driven organization, Kronologic is committed to continuous improvement.

ACTIVE SCHEDULING

Native Natural Language Processing

For understanding replies from Guests, Kronologic has migrated to a new Natural Language Processing tool called Merlin, specifically with reference to Time and Date Intent Recognition. 

OPERATIONS

Channels Tag Automation

All Kronologic objects can be tagged - providing the users the ability to categorize, segment and organize objects effectively. Now, Kronologic is embarking on a tag automation journey, with automatic tagging on the Channels - Import, Intercept and Update.

Channels are an important part of Kronologic’s ability to allow users to communicate meaningfully and automatically with their CRM applications. Through the use of Import/Intercept/Update channels, users can import contacts and create instances automatically, deactivate instances where necessary and update specific CRM objects.

When Kronologic objects are created/impacted by Channel operations, it can be very useful to tag such objects specifically, for later easy identification. Our Sep ‘21 release, we are happy to announce, incorporates Tag Automation for all three Kronologic Channels. Read on below for specific examples:

IMPORT CHANNELS - Import Channels primarily import Contacts (Guests) from the CRM and create Meeting Instances with these Contacts (Guests). With the “Auto tagging” facility, it is now possible to identify such Guests and Meetings with tags, so that it will be possible to identify/filter these Guests/Meetings at a later stage.

For instance, if a Team Lead with our customer decides to get her team to talk to every respondent of a particular survey - “Product A Renewal”. So, she creates an appropriate meeting type and an import channel to import all the respondents who are Contacts in their Salesforce CRM. Kronologic will then import these contacts and create meetings for each of these contacts. If she had created two tags, “Product A Survey Respondents” and “Product A Renewal Meetings” respectively for the imported Contacts and the meetings created, every contact imported through these channels will carry the tag “Product A Survey Respondents” and every meeting created will have the tag “Product A Renewal Meetings” associated with them. The team lead can then quickly identify these contacts and meetings by filtering on the appropriate tags on the Contacts and Meetings page.

As usual, more tags can be associated with the same contacts and meetings if required. As can be seen from the image below, the user can choose to “Auto Tag” either the contacts or the instances or both with same or different tags.

Clicking on the now familiar Tag Icon will bring up the Tag Drawer, which can be used for selecting existing tags or creating completely new tags for use here.

INTERCEPT CHANNELS - Intercept Channels allow admins to create logical conditions once satisfied, and will deactivate existing meeting instances. This is useful when a method other than Kronologic has been successful in getting a response from the prospect and the seller or BDR wants to stop further meeting attempts that Kronologic has planned for that Contact. From the Sep ‘21 release onwards, the team admin can choose to associate such meetings and contacts with specific tags, just like in Import Channels, so such meetings and contacts can be identified later.

UPDATE CHANNELS -  Update Channels facilitate the flow of information from Kronologic to the CRM. An update channel allows admins to create logical conditions that once satisfied, allow Kronologic to update the relevant Salesforce object with pertinent information, such as updating the status, stage, or owner fields. Again, when creating such channels, it is now possible to “auto tag” these Channels, so that every Instance & Contact about which information is updated in the CRM, can carry their own, specific tags.

These Auto Tagging buttons are available in the Channel edit pages as well, so that the user need not always create these tags when creating a channel. After creating a channel, the user can choose to apply these tags at a later stage or remove existing tags from the Channels as well.

We think this feature continues the Kronologic tradition of enabling meaningful automation, which is completely traceable. Do let us know your thoughts about this through feedback@kronologic.ai. We’d love to hear from you.

Instance Creation simplified

In the Instances page, the manual creation of Instances has been simplified now. The user can provide just one of the three attributes to create an instance - Meeting type, Host or Guest - and a Meeting Instance is created. All validations are carried out when the Instance is activated. 

This helps the User to create Instances manually at any time they choose. It is no longer necessary to create a meeting type first and a contact, before creating a meeting instance. If the user wants to create a meeting with a specific contact, they create a meeting with the contact and later realize that they do not have an appropriate meeting type for what they have in mind. At this stage, the user can save the meeting with just a contact, go ahead and create the meeting type and come back to complete the instance creation.

Just makes our User’s life a little bit easier, using Kronologic.

Start creating a meeting instance …

Meeting instance saved with just the Guest selected!

EXPERIENCES

Collapsible Invite Details

In the Instances page, clicking on the Last Activities cell of the Instance table brings up the Instance details dialog. This dialog contains all the details of the Meeting Instance, like the Meeting Invite, the System Notes detailing each stage and status that the Meeting Instance went through, the email exchange with the Guest. It also provides the host the ability to override some stages of the Instance.

Clearly, there is a lot of information in this dialog. We realize that this dialog can get to be fairly long with multiple attempts, and so we have re-organized this dialog. Now, the meeting invitation text is displayed separately in the dialog. The user can then close the meeting invitation to see the rest of the System notes and email exchanges. 

If at some point, the user wants to refer to the meeting invitation again, there is a handy inverted caret icon on the top right corner of the dialog, which the user can click to pull down the meeting invitation.

We continually improve our product based on your feedback. If you would like to provide insights in a short interview, please contact feedback@kronologic.ai.

Welcome to the June ‘21 Product Release Notes! This month is special - We are excited to announce the upcoming New UI for Kronologic. While all the functionality will be the same, the current Kronologic interface will be lifted and shifted to the new UI. 

Why are we doing this? The New User Experience will be snazzier (We think so! We’d love your feedback...). It will also lay the foundation to support exciting new functionality that will be soon released. It also introduces new concepts and supporting vocabulary. 

New Concepts and Vocabulary

The Individual who is assigned to host the meeting is no longer referred to as the “User” but as “Meeting Host”. The “Contact” invited to a meeting is now referred to as the “Meeting Guest”.

We now have independent Meeting Stages and Guest Statuses. The New Meeting Stages and how they map to the old are listed below:

Here’s a quick snapshot of Guest Stages and how they map to Meeting Instance Stages.

Here’s a screenshot of the New UI:

The Guest Status Summary reports in the top row of the Instance table page:

The next row is the Instance Stages Summary reports:

The new Meeting Instances table will look like this:

Once our users are familiar with this new UI, moving on to more advanced meetings will be a breeze.

The rest of the Release Notes detail the enhancements and the new functionality we released in the month of June ‘21, true to our credo of continuous improvement.

OPERATIONS

Hubspot Update Channels

In CRM Integrations, the Update Channel function was extended to Hubspot from June ‘21. The Channel Update feature enables the Kronologic Customer to update the CRM when a meeting event happens. This can help in reporting from the CRM or as a trigger for further follow-up. Using the Channel Update feature, a Kronologic Customer can instruct Kronologic to update a field in a specific record in the CRM with some predefined value, when a defined Kronologic event happens. Check out this link to understand the Update Channel feature in Kronologic in detail.

This feature was available for our customers using Salesforce CRM. Now, our customers using Hubspot can use it too.

For example, in the screenshot below, a new channel update rule is being set up for Hubspot.

For meetings of Meeting Type = “MG Type ROI”, 

• When any Guest accepts,
• Update the field “ID of first engagement” with  “Kronologic” AND 
• the field Lead Status is set to “CONNECTED” on the Contact object in Hubspot for that Guest.

Once this is set up, every time a guest accepts a meeting of type “MG Type ROI”, the corresponding Contact object will be updated in Hubspot.

Extract Sample Data from CRM to Test Import Channel Setup

When creating an Import Channel to import Contacts from the CRM, Kronologic now gives users the ability to get a quick preview of what data is going to be imported. A new “Sample” button on the Import Channels page will pull out and display contacts that satisfy the rules, for the last 3 days. 

The data extracted from the CRM is displayed on the bottom of the page.

Please note that this data is not actually imported, but only displayed. 

EXPERIENCES

CSV Upload Function on the Instances Page to Create Multiple Instances 

Kronologic Users can import multiple contacts from a CSV file and initiate meetings in Kronologic from the Contacts Page. This functionality has been extended to the Instances page as well. In the Instances page, clicking the “Upload CSV”  brings up the familiar upload dialog. The User can select a CSV file to upload and map the headers to the columns in the CSV file.

After mapping the columns to the headers to help Kronologic make sense of the uploaded data, a meeting type has to be selected. This meeting type will be applied to all the uploaded rows. The user can also apply tags to the meetings to track them later. Once these selections are made, the CSV file can be uploaded.

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We continually improve our product based on your feedback. If you would like to provide insights in a short interview, please contact feedback@kronologic.ai.