What's up everyone!
This is our second product update blog from December. You can see the first one here.
Lot's of exciting movement in the product and even during the holiday season... our developers are hard at work. Let's get right into it:
Introducing: Transaction Watchers 👀
When we started building full transaction management about two years ago, we realized there is a massive opportunity to eliminate redundant, duplicative communication by communicating within Sisu.
I'm sure our TC and Ops leaders reading this can resonate...
- How many times do you have to ask for the same piece of data?
- How many times do you GET asked for the same piece of data?
- How much time are you spending coordinating dates, timelines, tasks, etc between multiple agents and vendors, and across multiple mediums (email, text, phone, etc?).
That's why we started taking on communication inside of Sisu. So that you don't have to repeat yourself over and over, and there's one source of truth for internal communication on every transaction.
Dec 22's release introduces a super useful feature for communication in Sisu: Transaction Watchers 👀
Agents, ISAs and TCs get added automatically as watchers, but you can add additional users as needed.
One of the big use cases driving this feature is when using Sisu Forms at critical transaction hand-offs.
Sisu forms are the best way to create efficiencies in your data. Rather than manually entering data into spreadsheets, Google Forms, Wufoo Forms, etc... you can build out and use Sisu Forms. This makes it so that 1) you can start with a form that's half-populated from CRM data or pre-existing Sisu data 2) all of your data lives in Sisu where it's reportable, 3) you can use the form to kick off other processes in Sisu, like a contract to close checklist.
The more time we spend with clients who are getting the most value out of Sisu.... the more we realize that forms are the key to everything.
Becoming a watcher ensures that you never miss a key update when a form gets submitted or re-submitted.
Send custom emails from Sisu automatically
We've been able to send emails from Sisu for quite some time. If you need a refresher...
Head over to admin>tasks and click on "notification templates". Here, you can create different templates with merge fields. This means you can create something like this:
In addition, you can set the template to go out 1) when you want and 2) to whoever you want, based on the dates in the transaction.
So imagine your agent submits an intake form, and one of the key dates on that intake form is the financing and appraisal deadline.
You could set up a workflow where a custom email with custom merge fields goes out to both the agent and the client, three days before the deadline. This is one of the many uses of automated emails in Sisu.
Historically we've had two limitations, which were both addressed in this release:
1) The emails were Sisu branded rather than branded with your team's logos.
SOLUTION: If you're a premier customer on Sisu, your entire platform will be white-labeled with your branding, logos and colors. We will pull these same logos and colors into your auto-emails so that they look completely custom.
2) We couldn't customize the "from" email that replies were sent to.
SOLUTION: Reach out to success@sisu.co with whatever email you would like, and our team can set it up custom for you. The most common use case we're seeing is an email like "transactions@yourteam.com", where you can set up a forwarding list to loop in all members of your transactions/ops team. This way, you can be 100% sure that if your clients or agents respond to one of your auto emails, you'll capture the communication and take the right action.
API updates allow you to manage commissions via the API
Being an API first company means we have one strong objective:
Anything you can do in the user interface, you should also be able to do in the API
And while sometimes our user interface outpaces our API, and sometimes our API outpaces our user interface, we're always striving to keep them on par.
This update allows you to do just about anything commission-related via the API that you could in the user interface. This means:
- Adding referral adjustments
- Adding pre-split adjustments
- Adding splits
- Adding post-split adjustments
This opens a new realm of possibilities with what could be integrated into Sisu, specifically with any kind of brokerage-owned back office system (Like DASH or AccountTech). Moving commission numbers back and forth between these platforms could be very interesting.
If you're a developer with specific questions, please reach out to api@sisu.co.
While the Sisu team is working on a whole slew of new integrations for Q1 2022, you could also reach out to some of our recommended integration partners (like Datalabz.re, RealSynch.com or BaraAgency.com or build out something totally custom).
If you weren't able to check out this webinar we did with Justin Benson from Bara Agency last week, you should give it a quick listen. Justin has worked with a handful of clients and the Sisu API to build some insanely cool automations.
It's all about streamlining those processes!
Other miscellaneous updates
Other updates from this months release include:
- 2022 income numbers are now available in the "income monthly summaries" report.
- In order to increase the load speed and de-clutter the task manager, we've now removed completed tasks from the reporting. So you'll only see in-progress and upcoming tasks here. You can still see a list of all completed tasks by clicking into the transaction itself.
- Some of our integration partners create custom activities via the API automatically when you turn on their integration. We've made it so that these activities are eligible as a challenge type in admin>challenges
- We've released a whole slew of bug fixes and minor improvements, details here.
What's next?
We haven't tripled the size of our development team for nothing. Last week, we did a webinar in our mastermind group about our client-facing app—which is a way for you to take the same data that's already in Sisu and present it to your clients in a custom, valuable roadmap to close.
That's one of the most exciting items on the product roadmap, along with a slew of new integrations, integration improvements, more customizable reporting and improvements that help you streamline and automate your business.
2022 is going to be wild 🤠
