Harley Wolfarth walks us through importing and exporting customer files in the DeltaNET in this week's episode of Tech Tuesday.

 

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Good morning and welcome to another edition of Tech Tuesday, presented by Delta Media Group, where you'll surely find the best in real estate technology. But don't call me Shirley. Today, we are going to take a look at a nice simple one. We've been going over some, I don't want to say complicated, they're not really complicated, just feature-rich kind of features lately, where there's just a lot of pieces and a lot of things to go over, just to make sure you know everything there is to know about the system. Today, we have a nice reprieve. We're going to go over the customer import, and it is built for simplicity. So let's go in and take a look.

Now, to set up your customer import, we're going to go down to customers and then down to customer center. Then when that loads up here in customer center in the actions widget, we have a button that says, import/export customers, so I'm going to click on that. Then we'll start off with the import, so I'll click on import contacts. You can see it loads up our import screen here.

Now in general, the only thing that you need to do is select your file, so I'm going to click here on choose file. I'm going to try and remember where I put my test file. Look at that, I put it right there. Look at me all thinking ahead. I'm going to click here on open. You can see it loads my test file name up right here. From here, in this case it is an other CSV file. It's actually a CSV file that I export it from the Delta Net, so the fields are going to match up real easy for me. But if you had exported your file from Top Producer, or [Dacnow 00:01:52], or even Booj, you have some options here where you can select where that CSV came from,. When you click on it, you can see it tells you down here at the bottom what fields it's going to handle . Really what it does here is it's mapping the fields automatically for you.

In the next step where you'll see me map the fields, you're not going to have to do that if you have like a Top Producer CSV. You can just click here. It already knows where everything is supposed to go and then you hit upload. We'll go with other CSV file and I will hit upload file. There we go.

Now, that takes me to the next section where it describes to you what each field is and where that's going to go and gives you some previews based on the data taken out of your CSV so that you can see what data you're mapping into which field. It will try to figure out some for you. In this case, we have email, there was a column named email in my CSV, and it's looking at the column headings and my CSV. It found a heading, email, and it matched it up. Then it shows me down here, this is the data that's in that column or in each row, like the first rows. That way I have a sample of the actual data it's going to pull in there. The same goes for first name, last name. In this case because I had pulled this from the Delta Net originally, it found it easy to match up a lot of them cause the field names would already matched.

But if you're going from a third party CSV, all you have to do is, let's say, that this isn't actually your email column. I can just click here and I can select another column. Then that's the column it's going to fill in here. In this case, we've got email, first name, last name, so those all look good. Status, address one, address two, city, state, zip, all matched up. You just go down the line and match everything up. We have a phone daytime field, because it doesn't think that there's a column in my file that matches phone daytime, it just said to ignore the field. So, we'll click on that and see if I have a phone day time in here.

I have a cell phone, they have a day phone. There we go. You can see it picked up a number from one of the columns. These are blank because the first few rows of my CSV probably don't have data for these, so I don't have physical addresses for those contacts. Phone day time extension. I don't know if that's in here or not. Day phone, evening phone. Yeah, I don't see that. We'll just leave that on ignore. Phone evening, we saw that in here, so we'll find that one. Evening phone. Evening phone extension, phone cell. There was one of those. Cell phone. I don't think there was a fax number, but you get the idea here.

You can even go as far as importing a display name if you have a display name column in your CSV. You can use an envelope salutation, which is kind cool. That's the salutation that it would use on the mailing labels that you print out in the system. Regular salutation is the one you use for emails. The idea there is that you can have a different citation used in emails you send out to this account versus physical mailers you send out. If it's like the accounts kind of represents a husband and a wife, maybe you want to send out the emails individually to each of them, so you'll want them to each have their own salutation. But the envelope salutation, you might say mister And misses. That gives you the option of doing that. Not just doing it, because the system can support that if you enter the contact manually, but if you already have that data, this gives you the option of importing it.

Then we have birthday spouse, children. Purchase date, so it'll line up if you have data for that. You can import sold data, and this would be a listing sold instead of listings purchased, like purchase date. Company name, company address. There we are, company name.

Yeah, you can see a lot of matched up. I'll spare you going over all these. The one I will mention is notes. They're all broken down in one field, so you have a heading for notes. Then if you have multiple notes for that customer, they're just separated by commas or pipes in your CSV and it will know to separate them here. But you can see that it pick up the notes that I had in for these customers, because I have a column labeled notes in my CSV.

There we go. You can go through all these, and as long as you have matching columns, you can match them up. Now once you have those all chosen, you can go down here to the bottom and you can select a group that you want to import these customers to. Keep in mind that you do have a groups import here. If you are exporting or if this export came from a system that had groups attached to each of your customers, as long as you have a groups column, and for the data for each of the records, for each of the customers that are in groups, you have their group names in that column separated by commas or separated by pipes, this will already know what groups to put them in. For example, this record, so each of these dots has to do with basically a single customer record. It knows to import this person into each of these groups. It'll automatically put that customer in all of those groups.

Now, if you don't have groups set up in here, or if you just have your whole CSV import and you want this whole import to go into a specific group, that is what you can use this feature down here for. I can either choose from my existing groups or I can create a new group and I can say my new import group. I can name it whatever I want. What it'll do is in addition to putting them in the groups here, if you have any set, it'll put all of the customers from this import in this one group, because a customer can be in as many groups as you want them to be in. That is how it can handle that.

Once you're all set here, generally you'll just hit save and process now. What it'll do is save this important the system and start running the process to actually do all the importing of the customers. It doesn't do it instantaneously, but the nice thing about that is it doesn't matter how big your file is. It'll just go into a process and will run that process over time and get everybody in that file imported. How long it takes just depends on how many people you have in that file.

The next thing you can do is if you aren't sure or if you want to go back and look at your file or make any changes before you actually run this import, you can go here and you can hit save and process later. It'll save all the options I've selected for this important and basically saved the file. Then whenever I want to, I can come back to this page and I can actually kick off the import. Here I am back on the importer page. Says my options were saved. So now if I scroll down to the bottom, you can see that this is the one I just ran. It found 102 customers in the file. Here's the date that I set it all up, and right now the status is not ready.

If I go over here to actions, I can hit modify, which will take me back to the page I was in, where I can change any of the mapping or anything like that. I have set as ready, which will actually effectively set this. Then once it's set it, it'll start running the import. Set is ready basically just as process now, like run import. Then delete will just make this whole thing go away. If I decide that I don't want to do this import and I just want to start over from scratch if for whatever reason I don't want to run this, I can just hit delete and it'll go away. I've already played around with this file and import it with this count before, so I'll just leave it this way for now. We'll move on to the next step.

If I go back to customer center and look back down here to my actions widget and click back on import export again, my next option here is to delete imports. This is particularly nice if you have an import that for whatever reason didn't come through correctly. Maybe the email addresses didn't all go into the right field, maybe first names went into last name or one of a hundred other reasons. Just for whatever reason, maybe during the mapping process or the file itself had an issue, but the import just didn't work right. You can go back to this page and you can select from any of your imports and hit delete selected import, and it will actually delete that whole import.

Now again, this doesn't happen instantly. It depends on the size, but most of the time it'll happen pretty quickly. If it's a import of a couple of hundred customers, that'll happen probably in a few minutes. If it's 10,000 customers, then it could take a little while. But that's all you have to do. You go here and you just select the important you want to delete, hit delete selected import, and then it'll run the process and get rid of them.

Now, if I go back to customer center again, we'll go back down to import export here in the actions widget. The last option we have here is our export contacts. This is how you would actually export all of your contacts from the system. This isn't limited to just imported contacts, this is actually everybody that's in the system and assigned to your account. I'll hit export contacts. Now from here, I have a couple of options. The first thing I can do is I can limit my export to only customers that have registered in a certain time period. The nice thing about that is if you're making a backup, for example, maybe the first time you go here, you'll do an export of everybody, but just record what date that was, and then in three months or six months maybe you want to go in and make another backup. You'll go in here and say, "Only show me those that have registered between the data I did the last backup and the current date."

Or if I'm looking for something specific for reporting for example, and I wanted to see only customers that have registered like last month, I can do that here as well. I would just select my date here. Select my start date, select my end date. Then it will only look at customers that register during that time period. Now, we'll delete those, just because I don't think any customers have registered on my test account in that time, so we would have a pretty empty list here.

Then the next thing we can do is we can select from any of our groups created. So if I had a specific group of customers that I wanted to export, I didn't want to export everybody, I could select that group here. Then when I hit update list, it's only going to export those customers. You can see, for example, this is my open house guests for 867 South Boulevard, just a fake listing that I made up.

This was actually generated by Open House Connector. So if you were using the Open House Connector app and it was creating groups based on open house attendees or Open House guests, you could export a list of all of the Open House guests right from this screen. That's kind of a handy feature also, especially since those groups are created automatically, they'll already be in here so you can just run an export very easily. You can see I selected that group and I said update list. These are all of the customers that it found in that list. Now from here, they're all selected by default. I can choose whether or not I want to include the column heading. This is actually going to export a CSV, so I can export it with or without a heading, like a heading row on the columns.

Then lastly, I can select all or de-select all. I could pick individually if I want. Say I just wanted one of these, or if I want everybody I can select all, or if I want to unselect and just select a few, then I can do it that way, as well. But I'll hit select all. I hit selected contacts. Then it downloads the CSV. That's all there is to it. There we go. Had to think about it a minute. There's my CSV. Let's save. And now I downloaded my CSV contact data.

There you have it. That is how you import/export customers in the Delta Net, and also how you delete your imports if for some reason something were to go wrong. Nothing ever goes wrong ever, but just in case, it's good to know that you can delete those. There you go.

As always, thanks a lot for joining me. If you have any questions, concerns, comments about this or anything else, feel free to give us a call or send an email into support@deltagroup.com and we will be happy to help you out. Thanks a lot for joining me and have a great week.