The Relationships feature provides a centralized profile to communicate with related contacts.
Think: Spouses, business partners, father, son, etc. You can start conversations with more than one person and all communication with these related contacts will show on the same profile. Now it's easy to see the whole conversation and keep everyone in the loop.
Tip: Merge two test contacts before going ahead and merging a lot of people into Relationships!
Note: If you are needing or wanting two people to be separate contacts in a third-party system, keep them separate in Follow Up Boss. If you want to roll up people in a primary relationship instead, use Relationships.
How Relationships Work
Creating a New Relationship
1) Go to the primary contact record for a person you wish to add a relationship to
2) Click the + under Relationships to add a relationship, including name, email, phone, and relationship type > Save Relationship
3) Once a new Relationship is saved you can also add address details to that Relationship
Merging Existing Contacts to a Relationship
Mass Actions
1) Go to People > Filter to the desired contacts
2) Select the contacts you wish to merge
3) Click Mass Actions > Merge People
4) Select the main person to merge data to
5) Check Merge people as relationships > Yes, Merge 2 People
Contact Profile
Another way to merge is to go to the primary contact record for a person you wish to add a relationship to.
1) Go to the main contacts profile
2) Under Relationships, click the Merge Existing Person icon
3) Search by name, phone, or email for the contact > Select the desired contact > Merge
Future Roadmap Considerations
Here are some known items the team is looking into addressing in a future release. As always let us know what you think.
- Custom Fields (birthdays and more): Currently an automation can only send an email to the primary contact, not to a related contact.
- Third-Party Systems (Ylopo, Zapier, Active Pipe, etc.): Our existing person endpoint will return phone and email details of the related contacts under the primary but if a 3rd party system wants to directly work with relationships they will need to utilize the relationships endpoint.
- Mailchimp syncs only the primary lead's email address.
- YLOPO uses the lead's email address to link to Stars and if the lead has multiple email addresses, the Stars link will update with the one for the email most recently online.
- Zapier - relationships can’t be added via Zapier.
- Active Pipe - syncs only the primary lead's email address.
- Smart Lists. Relationship contact information is not available to view on smart lists. You can search by Relationship's names though.
- Unmerge contacts: When you merge contacts to a relationship, we presently do not have a function for unmerging the contacts.
FAQs
Adding a contact as a Relationship of another contact will keep all communications with both people on the same profile in FUB. It makes it easy to group text, group email, invite both people to appointments, etc. so that your history with those people is kept on a single profile.
For “relating” people like referring agents, lenders, title companies, etc., we recommend using Custom Fields instead of Relationships.
We will add a way for you to trigger a Birthday Automation for related contacts but currently, you can trigger a Birthday Automation for the primary contact only.