BatchBook Blog
Archive for the “Technology” Category
The fine folks over at Xioup who have wowed us in the past with their own custom development for BatchBook Web Forms have been brewing a new project for a while that we’re happy to help them announce today.
WebFormGlue is a new service that allows you to connect your web forms with various SaaS products. We’re psyched that they have decided to launch with their initial integration point featuring our very own BatchBook and our other fine friends over at Formstack.
They’ve got all the details and some sample forms you can fill out to give feedback and apply for alpha testing.
We’re excited to see the great things that people are building using our API.
Tweet This Post
Tags: api, formstack, web froms, webformglue
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.
Tweet This Post
Tags: Customer Experience, Jing, Working VIrtually
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.
Tweet This Post
Tags: batchbook, contact management, email, Raplets, Rapportive, social crm
You may have noticed our big announcement yesterday that BatchBook is now listed in the Google Apps Marketplace. We’ve since gotten a number of people (including reporters, other SaaS companies and even a few customers) asking us simply, “Why did you join?” So I thought I would share my response with you all.
As I explained to Mike Pearson who wrote an article about the new Marketplace for the E-Commerce Times, it just felt like the right thing to do. Let me explain why.
Google understands the value of giving customers control of their own information. All of the Google Apps business products have a publicly available API. You may think this is only important to tech addicts and uber geeks. But THIS IS HUGE for every entrepreneur who cares about growing their business. You see, this is Google’s way of saying (and something BatchBook says as well), “the business information that you trust to our care is yours – do what you need to do with it to succeed.” Yes, Google Apps let you send e-mails, schedule events and create spreadsheets. But they’ve just increased 20 fold what else you can easily do with YOUR information including tracking deals, sending newsletters, generating invoices, scheduling appointments, managing your projects, sending surveys and so much more.
And they were able to do that because a few years ago they made the decision to make their API, the gateway to the data stored within the Google applications, available to anyone their customers chose to grant access to it. They did it in a smart way, in a secure way and honestly, in a pretty gusty way. They knew customers might take their data and run. They knew competitors would have a peek at their inner workings. But they focused on empowering their users to take control of their own data, whether through a geeky friend, a trusted reseller, or another SaaS product. And their users are now benefiting immensely.
This idea is a founding principle of the Small Business Web, a movement we co-founded a year ago to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses. With more than 70 companies now participating, many of which are part of the new Google Apps Marketplace, we feel that the growing trend towards open integrations can only benefit small businesses.
So yes, the decision to join the new Google Apps Marketplace was a no brainer. They’ve made it easier for their users to access the growing number of applications they can use to run their business. We, of course, wanted BatchBook to be the first in line.
We are in this to help small businesses. And we know this is the right way to do it.
Tweet This Post
Tags: api, batchblue, batchbook, google apps marketplace, small business web
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!
Tweet This Post
Tags: batchbook, crm, Customer Service, customers, experts, small business CRM
Older Entries
