BatchBook Blog
Archive for the “Product Updates” Category
If you use Google to handle your email, you may have heard of the awesome social plugin from the folks at Rapportive. This plugin allows you to view the social connections of anyone who emails you right in the context of the email. Check it out:
This information comes up on the right of my screen whenever Rahul sends me an email. You can also hover over any email address and have the relevant info show up. Really powerful stuff and as lovers of all things contact data-related, we at BatchBlue have been big fans since they launched.
So of course we were excited when the folks behind Rapportive got in touch and asked if we wanted to participate in their new developer platform called Raplets. We immediately said yes and got to work.
What Raplets let you do is add onto the information supplied by Rapportive. In our case we can provide contact information, to-do (tasks) and comments. After setting up the BatchBook Raplet, you will see the following in addition to the Rapportive information:
With the BatchBook Raplet installed, from within Gmail, you can get a view of a person’s BatchBook information including basic contact information, any attached To-Dos and view/add comments without ever leaving your email. This is really powerful stuff and as you use it we think you will agree that it totally will rock your email world.
Additionally, if the contact does not yet exist in BatchBook you will see:
Click the “BatchBook It!” button and it creates the contact in your BatchBook account and even save the Twitter handle as well. A quick and easy way to get new contacts into BatchBook – we’ve already found this to be a huge time-saver and tremendously useful as we go about our busy days.
To install:
1. Go to Rapportive and install the plugin. You’ll need to use Google for you mail via Gmail or Google apps and also you must be using Firefox or Chrome as your browser.
2. Go to the newly-launched Raplet directory and select BatchBook. The install process will ask you for your BatchBook account name which is the first part of your BatchBook url. For example if your url is mycompany.batchbook.com then you would enter “mycompany” as the account name.
Then just make sure you are logged into your BatchBook account and start enjoying the awesomeness that is Rapportive + BatchBook.
We love that these guys are taking email to another level and are super excited they’ve invited us along for the ride.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, email, Raplets, Rapportive, social crm
You may have noticed a few new shiny links and buttons that we snuck into the BatchBook redesign. My favorite of these is a bright green “Search Social Network” button found under every individual’s name and title information. But don’t be fooled by the unassuming manner of this image – it actually wields a mighty power when clicked.
The “Search Social Network” activates a search through Sociotoco.com. Using the first/last name and relevant location information of your contact, the application searches through the Twitter, Flickr and LinkedIn sites and returns anyone that it thinks matches your contact. You might see a few erroneous people returned especially if you contact has a fairly common name, but you can use the included pictures and location information to help you find the right contact.
Once you’ve selected the radio button next to the matching social media accounts, click the “Save” button. Your contact will now have the social media SuperTag attached to this record and will pull the most recent Tweets, Flickr pictures and LinkedIn profile and display it on the contact page.
With this new integration, the click of a button now richly populates your contact’s profile with social media content that includes the observations, images, and relationships that make up their online world. Powerful stuff indeed.
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You’ll probably notice next time you log into BatchBook that we’ve added a fresh coat of paint and moved some furniture around a bit. Actually, it’s much more than that — what you are seeing is a culmination of four months of work to bring you of what we feel is a significant upgrade both visually and functionally.
First, we wanted to thank Alex Taylor of Big Ring Design, who is responsible for the new design. The BatchBlue team had a great time working with and getting to know him better over the past few weeks and we’re very pleased with the outcome of his efforts. Thanks, Alex!
Over the upcoming weeks, we’ll publish a few more posts that go into more detail about some of the specific changes, but I wanted to touch on the main areas of the site that were changed/improved.
New Quick Add options
- Quick Add an Event and a Deal
Dashboard
- Deals widget now displays totals and there is a new comments widget
Batch Actions
- Now options displayed in a drop down. Much cleaner.
Contact Detail
- Click & drag sections in body of page
- Activity log in body of page (not new, just moved)
- New, integration partners section in body of page
- Contact info in sidebar (not new, just moved)
- Social network search ( a big add – more details coming on this in another blog post)
- “Customer touchpoint” stats (created, last updated) in header as well as last communicated dates.
- Notes & attachments grouped together in new sidebar section
Communication Detail
- Attachment section now on sidebar
Browse Deals
- Admins can now create custom statuses. Now you can create a deal status of lead, prospect, etc to better tune your sales workflow.
- Deal totals shown on sidebar for admins
List Detail
- Record created/updated stats moved to header
Browse Tags & SuperTags
- Manage tags & STs in new, tabbed table; no longer in 2 separate tables
Sync
- Sync and integration services now in new, tabbed table
We hope you like what you see and that you’ll let us know your thoughts and feedback. We wouldn’t be where we are without our all the support and feedback we have gotten from our customers over the past couple years. So thanks to you all, too. Our customers continue to be an invaluable resource in growing and designing our product.
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Tags: batchbook, social crm
As small business owners, we work hard to best support our customers by quickly and efficiently answering questions and responding to issues. Now that most folks are online, our customers are contacting us in a variety of ways: through email, on the phones, in forums and even on Twitter.
Our latest integration partner, Zendesk, allows us to provide a huge step in better keeping track of your customer base and their communications with your company. Zendesk is a complete support site for your customers that allows you to collect and organize customer requests in one place. See a tour of Zendesk’s features in action.
With the BatchBook and Zendesk integration, you can view Zendesk tickets right from your BatchBook Dashboard. Once you’ve created a Zendesk account, head over to the Sync tab in your BatchBook account, select “Zendesk”, and add your Zendesk login information when prompted. Voila! The accounts will be integrated. This means that in BatchBook you’ll see:
- A dashboard widget that shows all open Zendesk tickets assigned to you.
- An activity log widget on each contact record that will show any Zendesk tickets that contact has submitted.
We hope that this new partnership will make it even easier for you to manage and grow your business and create lots of blissful customers along the way.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, Customer Service, small business CRM, zendesk
Another new major update as part of the new release of BatchBook for Sales is the new permissions based access to all of your BatchBook data. While we do still feel that access to the valuable customer information being collected in BatchBook is important to share with the team, we also realize there are times when you want to give an outside contractor or temporary sales rep access to a certain portion of the information.
By popular request, we’ve launched a new user level called the “Basic User” that has very limited access to only those contacts, communications, calendar items and deals that are assigned to them, that they have created themselves, or that you have proactively given them access to yourself. You will now see an option at the bottom of your BatchBook records to “Choose who can see this record” with checkboxes for each of the basic users in your account (and an option to give access to all basic users on your account). The basic user can then log into their own version of BatchBook and work on those items assigned to them without having access to the entire account.
For more information on setting up the new account level and granting permissions within BatchBook, please see our Basic User FAQ. And for more information on all user levels you can check out a description of all account levels.
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Tags: batchbook, crm, permissions, sales
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