BatchBook Tip: Temporary Tags Help Guide Workflow

• Posted August 25th, 2010
• By Scott (bio)
• Filed under: How We Do It, Using BatchBook

I’ve written in the past about some clever uses for Tags and how they can be used to help track all sorts of things from To-Dos to Communications and more. In chatting with the rest of the team and in working with our customers, it seems that most folks are using tags to denote that some sort of action has been completed or that the record is part of a group such as clients, vendors, Western Region etc.  While these are really great uses, in most instances folks are using tags to permanently note something about that record.

One thing that I find helpful though is to create and use tags on a temporary basis, in fact I often use tags as a pseudo To-Do item.  While our To-Dos are useful for specific actions, I often find that using a single word tag is sufficient to remind me that a particular contact, or contact record, needs some attention.  Here are a few examples:

BatchBox: All Items coming in to BatchBook through the BatchBox email get tagged automatically with a ‘Review’ tag. This lets me know that I haven’t yet acted upon that communication, be it to further process it or to verify that the contact it is attached to is completely populated and verified.

Review: This review tag gets used all the time as I’m working as well. If I am working and notice something inconsistent or incomplete in a  contact record I’ll tag it ‘review’ so when I have time to go in and take another look I can find them easily.

Delete: I also frequently use a ‘delete’ tag to flag items that I don’t think I need to keep active any longer. I like to verify things before just removing data though so I’ll just tag these items and I can remove them all at once using a batch action.

Follow-up: A lot of times I’ll be looking through my contact list and come across a record and think I really need to call or email them. I could create a To-Do for that but even with our quick add that could break the flow of what I am working on. I can hover over the contact though and add a quick ‘call’ or ‘email’ tag to follow up on later.

It’s easy enough to filter or search for all the records I’ve tagged and work through them as I have time. Removing the tag when the action is complete returns things back to normal.

Imports: Another really useful place to assign a temporary tag is on a new file import. Say you’ve got a list of leads you collected at a trade show and you have a series of actions you want to perform with that list, a weekly mailing for example. You could create tags for each of the dates and the step of the mailing – aug23intro, aug30intro2 etc. These tags remind you that you need to perform that action and also let you grab and consolidate the recipients together easily without needing to enter in a unique ToDo item for each record.

These are just a few examples of how I use temporary tags as part of my workflow – I don’t doubt that our smart users have plenty of others – feel free to share them in the comments.