BatchBook Blog
Archive for the “How We Do It” Category
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.
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Tags: tags, todos, workflow
Several people sent me the link to NYC VC Fred Wilson’s blog post in which he asks his readership for suggestions for a “Family CRM” service. He explains that he and his wife Joanne Wilson a.k.a Gotham Gal are looking for a way to share basic contact/calendar information, build some e-mail lists for social correspondence, planning and general family-managing.
In the thread, a few BatchBook customers recommended our CRM BatchBook (thanks Boris, Sri, Stefano and Sandro!), so I’d talk about how I use my BatchBook account to help manage my busy family.
First, I should explain that BatchBook was not designed for managing families, but it WAS designed for those small businesses that are about the same size, shape and energy level of an on-the-go family. I think the folks who recommended us recognize that the flexibility of BatchBook makes it work for all sorts of situations, including the work/life balancing (or is it juggling?) act that we small business owners face every day. As we know all too well, the line between business owner and family member frequently blurs.
My other co-founders and I started BatchBlue so that we could build a business deeply integrated with our family lives (I have three small children; they have two). Part of the solution for me has been using a personal BatchBook account to manage my family life. Here’s how I do it:
- I use my personal BatchBook account for my holiday mailing list, I’ve created a separate record for each person in a couple and link them with a “spouse” affiliation. I also created a field for how I want to address the collective them – ie “Dr. and Mrs. Allen” for my best friend’s older parents vs. “Sean Ransom & Michelle Riggen-Ransom” for my modern dual-name friends. I also created a field for their kids names so I can include them in the addressing.
- I’ve created tags for #doctor (which includes custom fields for hospitals & medications – my son has medical issues), #poker (my husband organizes a monthly game), #house (I seem to always call the plumber from the road), #holiday list, #teachers (with comments for gifts given so I don’t duplicate as multiple kids go through the same classes), #coach (same as teachers), #travel (my sister and I plan our family’s annual vacation so I’m usually dealing with hotels, house rentals, etc.)
- I am now the official keeper of my extended family’s official birthday and anniversary list, so I’ve created custom date fields for birthdays and anniversaries. My husband and I share a Google calendar and events I create from these dates automatically feed to it.
- I don’t keep my daily task list in BatchBook, but I do add events for recitals, performances, doctors appointments, etc. that feeds into my professional and my husband’s calendars.
- If I wanted to I could see my friends’ and families’ most recent Tweets, Flickr images, blog posts, etc. from within BatchBook, but honestly I don’t use this feature much in my personal account. These are all the same people I have on my special private Twitter list and I tend to keep up over there.
- I keep these all synced to my Android (and before that Blackberry) through Gmail. There is also a mobile version of BatchBook, and we are working to release native apps for the iPhone and Android soon.
My favorite criteria listed in the comments of Fred’s post (from wife Gotham Gal) is that the application they need should be built by a mom (we have a lot of those at BatchBlue, though we would add that a busy Dad’s probably just fine too!)
When it comes down to it, running a family is about managing relationships. No need to pie chart the likelihood of closing the deal, or dole out sales scripts to new employees. Just give me my son’s last prescription data when I need it, help me manage three different soccer schedules and keep me in good graces with my elderly Southern relatives who expect to hear from me no matter how busy I might be with work. Thanks to BatchBook, all that I can do.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, how-to, supertags, work/life
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
Typically when people travel for business it means packing up and heading out to destinations away from their office. Whether it is for client meetings or trade shows, folks take some time and work virtually, apart from their colleagues and the conveniences of their offices. They rely on communication and collaboration tools like Skype, email, and mobile phones to stay connected to their home base while physically away from the office.
A little while back I made my first business trip for BatchBlue, but it was a different sort of business trip because, unlike most business trips, for me it was my chance to abandon my virtual ways and physically be in the office with my coworkers.
I started working at BatchBlue back in February of this year but the team here and I go way back. I was a very early beta (alpha?) user, a regular in the forums, a reviewer of their product, a winner of their contests, an SBBUZZ guest and host, and now an employee. Through this all though, I hadn’t ever met any of my coworkers. We’ve talked on the phone, video chatted over Skype, emailed, tweeted, facebooked, but for people that I’ve “known” for nearly 2 1/2 years I had never seen, or met, any of them in person.
For me virtual is the norm, not the exception. I must rely on the communication and collaboration tools that we’ve chosen to stay integrated in to the workflow and to keep myself active. I attend a weekly team meeting via Skype and we use cutting edge technology to make sure that I’m visible to everyone.
BatchBlue by nature is still pretty virtual, even with our recent move in to our BatchHaüs, but I’ve been the most virtual of all. But for 3 days I got to sit alongside these wonderful, talented, and smart people and learn from them. We talked a lot about business, about BatchBook, about Customer Experience and how we can do better. But we also had a team picnic where I had the chance to meet spouses and families, and dogs. We also laughed and told stories and did the things that coworkers do.
Doing the work is only part of what is important at BatchBlue, and I think in any company culture really. I know that there are a lot of things I miss being separated, but the ubiquitous chats and the updates via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook – not only from the company but my colleagues helps me feel more connected.
Now, as I sit writing this, once again sitting in my virtual office, I am glad that I got the opportunity for the virtual to become real – if only for a little while. I also know that with each personal connection I get a little less virtual – no matter how far away I am.
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Tags: team, virtual
Things are looking up in the new BatchBlue offices these days. And by things, I mean myself who has to stand on tiptoes when talking to our two most recent hires, each of whom stand a foot above me. Not only are they doubling the size of our mighty tech team, they are helping us fill in the delightfully high ceilings in our new BatchHaüs. For a SaaS company it’s great to find smart guys with their heads in the clouds.
Let me introduce you to:
Alex Taylor (pronounced “tay-lor” and found at @goldenmeanie) is the talent behind the recent BatchBook redesign. Alex is a long time friend of the BatchBlue team, largely because of his excellent taste in footwear. He is our senior designer who will be pushing BatchBook, HTML5 and loungewear to the limits in our super secret new project.
Eric Krause (pronounced “krow-zee” and found at @erickrause) is our new RoR master. We found Eric through the local Ruby group and won his heart with a giant pile of M&Ms (we often bribe with chocolate). Eric will be syncing up some batch integrations and helping train the new recruits as we continue to grow our elite team.
Join us in welcoming Alex and Eric to the BatchBlue family. We have some very exciting projects in the works, so are thrilled to have their tall talents supporting us.
Editor’s note: Wow, KrauSAY! really is taller than Alex!!
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Tags: batchblue, batchhaus
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