Being a largely virtual team, our Customer Experience group has come to rely on lots of different tools and technologies to stay connected and manage our work. I thought it might be interesting to feature some of the tools that we use to do the stuff that we do every day.
A big part of working with our customers is to answer their questions and help them resolve any issues that they may be having with BatchBook. On our team, we do a lot of collaboration amongst ourselves to share ideas and ask each other questions. Since much of this information is visual, we’ve really come to rely on a tool called Jing. A picture is often worth a thousand words – and Jing helps us create and share those pictures. It’s often a lot easier to put a big arrow on an image and say “Look Here” than it is to try to describe things.
If you’re not familiar with Jing, it’s a really nifty screen capture tool that lets you quickly and easily grab and share screenshots and screencasts. For us, the quick and easy really is the key to Jing and why we have all naturally gravitated towards using it. With just a couple of clicks, we can grab all or a portion of our screen, annotate it with highlights or text, and then share out those images with the rest of the group.
Jing integrates with screencast.com to host or store these images and with a click it automatically uploads the file and puts the URL on the clipboard. This lets us share the image with each other via Skype, send it out to a customer via email, or add to an issue ticket for the tech team.
We’re starting to use more short screencasts in the group as well since they are so easy to make. To show a series of events or to document how we achieved a particular result is really much easier to do visually than to write out a series of steps.
We find that being able to show each other visually what we’re seeing makes us work much more productively and able to respond to our customers and share information with each other much more efficiently.
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Tags: Customer Experience, Jing, Working VIrtually
Getting started with BatchBook typically involves getting the data you’ve collected in various other systems or spreadsheets in to the system so you can begin to do all of the wonderful things that being organized brings. Your data comes from many different places so we do our best to make the process as easy as we can.
Whether it is our custom import template, our screencasts, FAQs, or even our experts who can help you with even the tiniest of details, we know that you can’t use BatchBook until this very important first step is done.
So our Customer Experience team got together and put together this list of our Top 5 Tips on how to make sure your import process is a success.
1) Use our import template. Having your data formatted properly is the most important step in the process. Each data type must be clearly labeled and all of your rows and columns must match up to make sure that BatchBook knows where to put your data. Don’t worry though – we really do make it easy if you let us.
Each account comes with its very own Import Template that is customized to hold all of your SuperTag Fields and custom data, it’s also in the proper .csv format that we need. It may seem easier to try to modify the file you exported from your old system, but trust us – failing to use the import template is the most common reason we see people asking for support to resolve import failures.
2) Import your companies and your individuals separately. While this isn’t required, it helps make sure that the data you are uploading gets applied to the proper records. We love how BatchBook lets you enter in company data and have it automatically appear at the employee or personnel level and with a little bit of planning you can do the same thing in your import.
To make sure that your company specific address and contact information is complete and tied to your company record you’ll want to have it appear as a unique line in your data file – without a person’s name. Keep any information that applies to the company itself like website, main address, and common phone numbers. This will create company records in your BatchBook account with all of the company data all ready and waiting to be pushed down to your other contacts.
After this step, you can then import your file of individuals. You’ll want to be sure that the company name is an exact match to what you have already entered and we’ll take care of matching them up automatically. You’ll also want to remove any information from those individual’s records that are duplicates of what you’ve already entered in for their company. Leave only information that is unique to that user like their personal email address, phone w/ extension, personal cell phone etc.
3) Do a small test import first. We try to make the process as simple as possible and you’ve done a lot of work to get everything lined up and in the right place. Before you go ahead and upload that whole file, grab a couple of company records and related individuals and start with just those folks. See how the import works, make sure that the data is in the right place. Did your SuperTags format properly? Did your Tags import correctly? It’s a lot easier to delete or change a few records, modify your data and try again than it is to have to undo a full import or correct thousands of records. Keep importing a few at a time until you know it is perfect – then let it loose.
4) Break up large imports in to smaller files. We recommend not uploading or importing more than 5000 records at a time. This keeps the file sizes manageable to avoid any issues with time-outs and keeps the actual import times to workable levels. It also lets you correct any issues with specific record import errors in smaller batches.
5) Watch your SuperTags. The import template will clearly identify which fields and columns should contain your SuperTag data but you’ll need to be sure that the data you put in there matches not only the field type you’ve created but also if you have entered in specific options or choices, that your import data matches that information exactly. Yes and Y are different. No and none are different. If your test imports are failing, this is the first place I would check.
Armed with this info you should be able to get started with nice clean organized data in your BatchBook account.
As always, check out the support area of our site for more information or send us an email to support@batchblue.com if you need any help or have specific questions on how best to make this work for you.
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Tags: imports, tips and tricks
Last week was a milestone week for us. It was the two year anniversary of the launch of BatchBook and the starting week for our three (!) newest employees.
It’s a very exciting time here at BatchBlue. We’ve seen rapid growth not only in BatchBook, but in our weekly Twitter chat SBBuzz and our SaaS coalition the Small Business Web. We have some related major new launches coming up and to help us prepare, we were lucky to have found three amazing new employees.
Allow me to introduce:
Mikey Hougland (@lamikey) is a local artist about the town and our new on-staff designer. We have known Mikey for a couple of years and have attended many Providence Geeks meetings and even SXSW parties together. Not to mention her dog (and Twitter user!) @scoutsprout is a t-shirt wearing BatchBlue fan. We’re thrilled to have Mikey’s help in making the BatchBlue world visually interesting and useful for our customers.
Scott Blitstein (@scoblitz) is living proof that online relationships are the real thing. Scott was an early beta user of BatchBook, he has been one of the most frequent non-employee contributors on our forums, he’s written about us on a number of different blogs, participated in every contest we ran, regularly attends and periodically guest moderates on SBBuzz and helped us develop our new Experts Program. I’ve never actually met him in person, haven’t seen his resume or CV, didn’t ask for writing samples and yet when he expressed an interest in working for us, I knew immediately we had to hire him. And we’re lucky he said yes! He’ll be joining the Customer Experience team, working over on our forums, writing for the blog and just generally being the helpful guy that he is.
Christelle Lachapelle (@stellel) is our newest Customer Experience diva. She found us through our good pals at MailChimp (so we knew she was a smart lady) and told us in her cover letter that she would look good in a pink mustache. Her personality came through in every communication we had with her, so we knew she would be a great addition to our fanatical customer support team.
Please join us in welcoming the latest BatchBluers. We’re glad they are along for what promises to be a very fun and interesting ride.
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Tags: batchblue, hr, Social Media, virtual office
Webinars make your fingers go faster!
You may have had the chance to work with our amazing Customer Service and Onboarding Specialist Stephanie Sweeney. Did you know that she also runs our Webinar program? At least twice a month, Stephanie provides free online training on how to better use BatchBook to run your business. Recent topics include “Using BatchBook for Fun & Profit”, “BatchBook for Sales” and “The Small Business Webinar”, which looks at how BatchBook integrates with some other cool small business web apps like MailChimp, Freshbooks, Zendesk and Shoeboxed. And there’s always a Q&A session at the end, so you can ask specific questions that you may have about how you’re using BatchBook.
Register now for today and next week
The schedule can be found on our Onboarding page, but I’ll save you the click. Today at 2pm ET we’ve got “Using BatchBook for Fun & Profit” (which is kind of our BatchBook 101) and next Thursday, January 28th at 2pm ET is the very popular “Small Business Webinar“. Click the title of the session to register.
We encourage you to check out a webinar if you haven’t had a chance to. If you can’t make it, we have some recorded and posted on the Onboarding page for viewing at your leisure. And we will be adding more in upcoming weeks.
We’re always looking for ways to help our customers succeed with our product. Please let us know what webinar you’d like to see and maybe we’ll add it to our webinar schedule!
UPDATE: Due to a scheduling conflict, the Small Business Webinar date has been moved to Thursday, February 4th at 2pm EST. Still plenty of time to register here!
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Tags: batchbook, Community, Customer Service, training, tutorial, webinar
We’ve put together a new program here at BatchBlue. You see, as we’ve grown our product and our relationships with the folks who are using it, we came to realize there are some very smart people out there who are coming up with some ingenious ways to set up and use BatchBook for their various CRM needs.
We wanted to introduce you to the folks who we know from their involvement in our forums or with our customer service team as expert BatchBook users. They each have experience setting up BatchBook accounts for themselves and their own clients, and are now available to help our users with some of the more advanced functions in BatchBook such as:
- Prepping database and spreadsheet files and importing them into BatchBook.
- Setting up custom fields using SuperTags and importing custom data from other systems.
- Developing custom reports and lists.
- Writing scripts to connect the BatchBook API to other products such as e-commerce forms, blog site, etc.
- Using the BatchBook API to migrate data from other CRM systems
We borrowed this idea (with their blessing) from our friends at MailChimp.com, who have had their own successful experts program in place for a while now. Also — special thanks to our Lead Expert Scott Blitstein from eSeMBe.com for helping us put this program together.
Please check out our newly vetted experts. If you’d like some help with your own BatchBook account, feel free to contact them directly for more information on their services and rates. And, if you think you have what it takes to guide our users through the wonderful world of BatchBook, you can learn more about the Experts program and apply here. Whooo knows? One day you could be BatchBook Expert, too!
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Tags: batchbook, crm, Customer Service, customers, experts, small business CRM
