Last week, I posted about our recent flurry of updates to BatchBook. After a weekend to play with some of the new changes, there’s one I really love. It’s the List widget on the Dashboard.
And we love to give props where props are due. So, yet again, that was a recommendation that came from the forums. In this case, forum user Barbara Ballard asked:
Inspired by the Marketing dashboard widget … I created “Barbara’s list”. It’s all current clients, alumni, leads, projects assigned to me. It’s who I should be thinking about this week, who I should pay attention to. … Now I want it on my dashboard.
We had been talking about doing a saved search widget. But when Barbara recommended putting Lists on the Dashboard, an bell went off in my head. First of all, Lists are already part of BatchBook. This would put something on the Dashboard that just about everybody is already using in their account. Nothing new to learn. Instant gratification. Secondly, a saved search is best handled as a list anyway. That way it will always update, always be accessible, always be exportable, etc.
It was the perfect solution.
Thank you, Barbara, for your excellent recommendation!
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Tags: Customer Service, lists, Our Users are So Smart
Last night, BatchBlue Onboarding Specialist Stephanie Sweeney and I made the drive up to Boston to attend the Rock Stars of Social CRM event, hosted by Radian6 and Chris Brogan. They had a lot of fun with the Rock Star theme, complete with colored stage lights, concert tees and even a full-blown Rock Band set-up for audience members to rock out with after the panel.
The panelists included were Frank Eliason (Comcast), Paul Greenberg (Author of CRM at the Speed of Light), Michael Thomas (National President, CRM Association), and our favorite CRM go-to guy, Brent Leary (Co-author of Barack 2.0 and Co-founder of CRM Essentials).
Because we consider BatchBook to be a social CRM (slide via Brent Leary), I was curious to hear what the folks at the cutting edge had to say. I was especially impressed with Frank Eliason’s inclusion on the panel, since he represents a company that is actually out there doing all this stuff. While I always appreciate the bird’s eye view from consultants and experts, I have to agree with Doug Haslam of Shift Communications‘ assertion that he’s getting a bit impatient with social media.
After the panel, Doug and I had a brief conversation where I wondered if, when email entered the picture ten years or so ago, there were endless conferences and seminars and articles written about how email (a communication tool in the same way that social media is a communication tool) was going to fundamentally change the business world.
Admittedly, email did change the way companies interacted with their customers – I was in the customer service department at Amazon.com in 1997 and I witnessed it happening first-hand. Customers found it insane that we didn’t take phone orders; that Amazon was an Internet only company. At the time, we were too busy answering customer emails to talk about email as a tool.
That experience definitely influenced BatchBlue’s commitment to providing excellent service. One thing BatchBlue does using social media is host a weekly Twitter chat called SBBUZZ, where small business owners can talk about the issues (largely focused on social media and other technologies) that are most important to them. What’s nice about this event is that a real community of folks has developed there. Each week, there’s an opportunity for folks to share what’s working, what’s not, what kind of issues people are having, even just to swap funny stories about what happened over the course of the past week as they deal with running and growing their businesses.
If Social CRM is all about the customer, I guess what I’m missing at these big, “rock star” events is more of a presence from other small business owners who are in the trenches, actually using these tools to build their customer relationships every day. There are plenty of Rock Stars out there, talking to each other on SBBUZZ and similar social media places. And my favorite Rock Star, Stephanie, was sitting right next to me. She in every way embodies customer service and building customer relationships done right. I’d wear her concert tee any day.
Image: Chris Penn a.k.a. Financial Aid Podcast via flickr
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Tags: @sbbuzz, chris brogan, Customer Service, radian6, rockstars of social crm, small business, social crm, twitter, twitter chats
The lawn needs mowing and the Red Sox are on a winning streak, so that can only mean one thing… it’s spring! We have a bunch of cool things under development (if I do say so myself), but before we start adding more to BatchBook, we felt it was time to do a little spring cleaning. The community over at the BatchBlue Forums has helped us so much along the way that we consider it an additional team member. For that reason, we’re giving the forum users a sneak peek at the updates we’re making.
If you’re a forum user, we’d love to hear your feedback. If you’re not a forum user yet, we’d love to welcome you to the community. As forum user Kenny recently said:
One of the key benefits BB is becoming for me is an excellent source of tips on new or emerging web sites / services that I hadn’t been aware of previously, via users on this forum.
This is great! Thanks all for participating on this board 
Hope to see you on the forums soon!
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Tags: batchbook, Community, design, forums, interface
Just a quick announcement from the On-Boarding deck:
Since the launch of our New Customer On-Boarding program, we’ve helped countless customers get their BatchBook account up and running in no time;but now we want to help even more. How is that possible, you ask? By offering free, information packed webinars to all customers.
Our first webinar is called “Using BatchBook for Fun and Profit”. It will cover all of the basics that you need to know in order to have a fun and productive BatchBook experience, which in turn means a fun and productive business! The webinar will be on January 30th at 2pm EST. It should run about 45 minutes, with a 15 minute question and answer session at the end.
If you’re interested in attending, please send an email to me to onboarding@batchblue.com and I’ll add you to the list. We look forward to helping you get organized in 2009!
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Tags: batchbook, webinar
You may have thought the BeeGees had three members (OK, four if you include Andy). But our social media BeeGees are actually five in number.
Lately we’ve been asked by some pretty smart folks about what our social media strategy is and how we’ve been using social media to help our small business grow. In thinking about the answer to this question, I’ve come up with what really is at the heart of what we as a company strive to do. It’s not as much of a strategy as it is a philosophy. And because we’re BatchBlue, there had to be some disco involved just to keep it fun.
“B.G.” in this case stands for “Be Good“. These five principles drive everything we do, from late-night work sessions, to customer feature request reviews at staff meetings, to raising money for local food shelters. So crank up the hi-fi, put your earphones on and settle back to enjoy the high-pitched melodic stylings of the BeeGees of Social Media:
1. Be Good at your product or service. There’s no sense in trying to sell a product that you don’t believe in. It’s a waste of your time and your potential customers’ time. Make your product or service awesome. If you make widgets, they should be the best darn widgets out there. If you polish widgets, they should end up really, really shiny. And, more importantly, help make your customers be awesome in using your great, shiny widgets. They will love you for it.
2. Be Good at customer service. Customers should always have a good experience with your company, even if they decide not to use your product or service. Who wants to have a bad experience when trying to get something done? Nobody, that’s who. The new numbers floating around indicate that a happy customer will tell three people, but now thanks to the power of social media, an unhappy customer can reach an average of 3,000. You want happy customers — the numbers prove it.
And, not only do customers give you a chance to get valid feedback on your product or service, they often have suggestions that will wildly improve it. Therefore, you should also…
3. Be Good at listening. Like it or not, people are out there talking about your company. A social media-savvy company will be all ears, listening what people love or hate about them and responding where appropriate. Have a blog? Open comments and respond to each one. If you have folks who are passionate about your product or company, look at hosting a forum where they can talk to you and to each other. Ning is a great, free networking site where like-minded people can come together to discuss things, and you need virtually no technical knowledge to set it up.
Monitor your brand on Twitter using Twitter search to see what folks are saying there. Type in your company’s name and “sucks” in Google search to see if anyone is damaging your brand without you knowing it. Again, the conversations are happening out there – and no one likes it when people talk behind their back, right?
4. Be Good at sharing. In his new book Outliers, writer and social theorist Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. You might not be an expert, but whatever it is you do, you probably know more about it than most people. Write a paper or a blog post and share what’s worked for you. Someone is bound to find it helpful.
Many folks are giving away great, relevant content via their blogs. Chris Brogan gives away daily advice on social media on his blog and often publishes free eBooks. Todd Defren writes smartly about PR over at PR Squared. And Anita Campbell’s SmallBizTrends is chock full of advice for, you guessed it, small business owners.
Last, if a customer has given you a great suggestion that you’ve ended up using, tell the world! It will be good, free publicity for them and give you some of that whuffie that the Internet folks are so crazy about these days. We run a series on our blog featuring customers suggestions we’ve implemented called Our Users are So Smart because, well, they are! We wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.
5. Be Good. This one is Very Important. If you own your own business or have a job working for someone else, you’re better off than a lot of folks in the world. Give of your time, give of your money, give of your service. Only good will come of it.
Maybe this post didn’t quite get you dancing (although you should be!) but especially in this economy, following the BeeGees just might be what keeps you Stayin’ Alive.
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Tags: bee gees, communications, Customer Service, Social Media
