Reply Updates: Roles & Permissions, Channel Efficiency Dashboard, and More

Introducing Roles & Permissions in Reply

We all know sales is a team effort – even more so for larger and more complex sales organizations, including lead generation agencies. So we’ve been getting a lot of feature requests to give more power and capabilities to such teams specifically. 

And so we did!

Ladies and gentlemen, let me present the highlight of the latest release – Roles & Permissions in Reply (now available in Beta)!

Here’s a brief overview of what has changed and the new capabilities we’re offering as a part of this major update.

Organization and Teams

Growing our network of agency partners and talking to dozens of teams over the past few months, we’ve been 100% focused on making our product more convenient and valuable for them. 

As part of this effort, we are changing the hierarchy within the product to add two new entities in Reply:

• Organization – the company or the agency itself that handles billing, can create multiple teams within one account and manage roles and permissions for team members according to specific business needs.
• Teams – the departments inside the company (like Sales, Customer Success, and Customer Support) or agency clients with their own sequences and contacts. 

To make it more convenient, you can use the same account across different teams within your organization (and switch between them) using the Team switcher.

As a part of the new hierarchy, we’re also introducing Roles in Reply – different sets of permissions (actions) that each particular user is allowed to perform within the given team in your organization.

• Team Roles

To improve visibility within the team, we’re adding Team Roles that can handle permissions on the team level, like the ability to work with Sequences, Contacts, Reports, Tasks, and Integrations. The two default options available now are Team Lead and Team Member. Later on, you can modify these default settings and create your own roles with specific permissions.

• Organization Roles

To handle permissions at an organizational level, like billing, inviting users, creating teams, creating and assigning team roles, managing permissions, and more, we’re also adding Organization Roles (with only one option available at the moment – Organization Owner).

• Organization Owner

This role is assigned to the main user that can create and manage your Reply workplace, including any actions related to Organization and Team roles.

This new hierarchy should help agencies and businesses using our platform build more efficient workflows in Reply, creating virtual teams that mimic the real company structure, and better manage their work within the organization across separate teams as well as clients.

You can find a more detailed description of the new hierarchy and the changes that come with it in this article.

Permissions in Reply

A major update that goes hand in hand with the newly introduced Roles is called Permissions.

Every Permission is a setting that allows a user to perform a specific action or view a particular functionality in Reply. You can manage permissions once you select a specific role in a specific team from the left-side menu (More → Organization → Roles & Permissions tab). 

Here, you can manage permissions for both Organization and Team Roles. Organization level permissions include the ability to add users to the organization, create teams, manage billing, etc.

For all team roles, permissions are divided into several categories related to a particular functionality in Reply:

• Sequence
• Contacts
• Template
• Report
• Tasks

Each category contains a list of permissions that relate to a particular functionality in Reply.

Channel efficiency dashboard

We understand how important it is to also be able to track your activities and get visibility into your results for each channel you use. As a result, one of the key areas of improvement recently has been our work on the dedicated dashboards for emails, calls, tasks, social steps, as well as overall team performance. 

Yet, with all the information scattered across several dashboards, it might be difficult to make sense of it. As a sales leader, you need a 360° view of your channel performance to be able to plan your sequences better and allocate your team efforts accordingly. 

That is why we’re adding the Channel efficiency dashboard to the Reports in Reply. 

This new dashboard brings together reports and analytics on your outreach campaigns across all the channels you’ve used, neatly organized and easy to understand. 

For each communication channel, you can see the percentage of replies, touches, and meetings booked. So it’s easy to understand your overall results, compare the conversion rates, and figure out which channels work best at turning leads into booked meetings.

The dashboard includes the following sections:

• Key metrics
• Best performing channels
• Channel efficiency (with different views)

To read more about the channel efficiency dashboard, follow this link. 

New in Salesforce integration 

Integrations represent another focus area for our team as we strive to make Reply an integral part of your sales stack. So we’ve been adding more capabilities and polishing our integrations with the top CRM platforms in the latest releases. 

Now, let me walk you through the recent updates to the Ownership mappings in our Salesforce integration.

• Ownership mappings – People sync (available for all users) 

With this option, you cannot only transfer contacts between the two platforms, you can assign the synced contacts directly to a certain team member or even a sequence in Reply. As this is a bi-directional integration, the same logic is applied when syncing contacts to Salesforce.  Read more here.

• Ownership mappings – Emails sync (now in Beta)

Another available option – Emails in Reply to Contacts/Lead tasks in Salesforce – allows you to sync records about emails between two platforms. Now, with the ownership mappings, all emails sent from Reply accounts (that you have selected through the mappings) will be logged to Salesforce as an activity for the selected contacts/leads that already exist in Salesforce.

Read more here.

• Ownership mappings – Calls sync (now in Beta)

You can also sync Calls in Reply to Contacts/Leads tasks in Salesforce. Once you map the user who has made the calls, Reply activity related to the calls will be automatically transferred and logged under the selected Salesforce user.

BTW, we’re also finishing up the Owner mappings for tasks which will be available in BETA with the next release. So stay tuned for that!

More Reply updates and improvements

Whoa, this is a pretty big list of updates! But there’s more we would like to share with you.

Here’s a brief overview of even more Reply changes and improvements.

• Choose email addresses to discover. You can now scroll through the search results and manually pick the contacts you want to look up (without wasting credits searching for all the contacts on the list).

• CRM link in Chrome extension. This allows you to go quickly from the Chrome extension to the contact’s profile in your CRM and perform the required actions or look up the necessary information there.

• Send emails to contacts in consolidated inbox threads. With this update, you can catch up on the new email replies across all the sequences and reply to them, all in one place.

• Export social activity report. You can now export data from the main Reports page.

• Multiple Branded links. If you have several domains and multiple email accounts, you’ve previously had to manually assign a batch of branded links to each email account. Now, we’re introducing the “multiple” option that is aimed to improve UX and simplify this task. 

• A/B step API statistic endpoint. We’ve created an additional endpoint with details for different A/B step results to help you better analyze your campaign outcomes and improve them accordingly.

• CTR parameter in email report. In Email sequences that contain a link, you can now track your click-through rate – the number of clicks you receive per number of impressions. This can help you improve your email content and compare the outcomes to other channels.

To be continued

Now, that’s what we call a product update – plenty of new features and tons of added value for you, our users!

But there’s also a cherry on top for nonusers: You can now sign up for Reply using free email accounts. So if you’ve taken a peek inside our platform and it’s piqued your interest, take advantage of the opportunity.

If you’re already our user, we hope the updates listed above will help you crush your holiday season sales and close the year strong.

Keep an eye out for more updates coming your way soon!