Over the past few months, we’ve moved the last features across to the new customer portal and added native support for imperial units. We’ve also made it easy to give your customers guides inside the portal, and moved key background jobs onto a new scheduling engine. Here’s what’s new, and what it means for you and your customers.
Everything from the old portal, now in the new one
The new Online Tools customer portal now has the last features that used to exist only in the old portal. These include return labels, merging bookings, and hiding ports and airports in the calculator. They also include embeddable versions of pages such as the booking list, address book, booking templates and upload bookings.
Your customers no longer have to choose between the portal they know and a better experience. They sign in with their existing user accounts, and their bookings, address book and booking templates are already there.
The new portal is also where new features are added. The guides described below, for example, are only available there.
Metric or imperial: quote the way your market works
Not every market measures freight the same way. fLex now supports metric and imperial units natively, from the quotes you build to what your customers see.
In fLex, you can create quotes in imperial from the start instead of converting them from metric. Limits and overweight surcharges on your services can be set in imperial, and spot quotes can be switched between the two systems.
In the customer portal, each user chooses metric, imperial or both in their profile settings, and the calculator and booking forms follow that choice. fLex converts automatically, so any quote works in either system. That covers customers who think in kilograms, centimetres and cubic metres as well as those who think in pounds, inches and cubic feet.
Your own guides, right where your customers need them
Good guidance saves time for everyone. You can now add your own guides, as PDF documents or videos, to the new customer portal from a dedicated page in fLex.
Each guide belongs either to the portal as a whole or to a specific module, such as the calculator, bookings, address book or upload bookings. Customers find all guides in the help menu at the top of the portal, and pages with guides get their own help button. PDFs and videos open inside the portal, so users don’t have to leave what they’re doing.
Guides are added per language, and each user sees the guides in their own language. If a module only has guides in one language, fLex flags it so you can fill the gap.
It’s an easy way to onboard new users, introduce new features and answer common questions before they reach your support team.
Smarter scheduling behind the scenes
A lot of fLex’s work happens in the background. That includes updating tracking on courier bookings, fetching proof-of-delivery documents, booking next-day pickups, updating currency exchange rates, sending reminders about expiring quotes and resending emails that failed.
These jobs now run on our new scheduling engine, which is live in production. It gives us detailed control over three things:
When jobs run. Each job has its own schedule, and the same job never runs twice at the same time.
How errors are handled. We decide job by job what should happen when something goes wrong.
Visibility. Every run is logged, and a failed job triggers an alert straight away.
For you, that means more reliable, predictable processing, and problems are spotted and fixed sooner. There’s nothing you need to do.
Want to know more about any of these updates, or plan your move to the new portal? Get in touch, and we’ll be happy to help.
Frequently asked questions
How do we move our customers to the new portal?
The new portal is switched on for your whole fLex setup. Get in touch, and we’ll plan the switch with you.
Do our customers need new logins?
No. They sign in with their existing user accounts, and their bookings, address book and booking templates are already there.
Do we have to switch to imperial?
No. Metric stays the default. Imperial support is switched on with a setting, and after that each portal user can choose metric, imperial or both.
Can customers who work in imperial use quotes made in metric?
Yes. fLex converts automatically, so every user works with quotes in the system they’ve chosen.
Which formats can we use for guides?
PDF documents, video links and common video formats.
Can we offer guides in more than one language?
Yes. Each guide is added for one language, and users see the guides for their own language. fLex warns you if a module only has guides in one language.
Does the new scheduling engine change anything for us?
Not in how you work. Background processing becomes more predictable, and issues are picked up faster because every failed job triggers an alert.