BatchBook Blog
Archive for the “User Experience” Category
Last night we made some (mostly) cosmetic updates to BatchBook. Here’s how she looks today:
The highlights:
- We consolidated help text and screencasts into a context-sensitive footer that provides support options for the tab you are currently on.
- We reorganized the rest of the footer as well.
- We anchored the primary column to better establish the visual hierarchy of the main column vs. the sidebar.
- We removed redundant headers to make more room for the data that matters.
- We moved the search bar to the header, bringing other sidebar elements up the page a bit more.
- We used more subtle color to cater to those not in love with blues and oranges.
- We made an assortment of other minor tweaks.
When it was all said and done, we removed a lot more than we added. To me, that’s the sign of a successful redesign. 
We’re curious to hear what you think!
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, design, small business CRM
With the imminent demise of several prominent Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses recently announced, I’m sure folks are wondering about the reliability of this “cloud computing”. People who are trusting their relationships, their daily routines and their future fortunes to an unknown, unseen geek posse at the other end of the Internet deserve more respect. Honestly, I think these trusting folks have taken it on the chin this week.
As SaaS developers, we’re not building tools that people pick up, use, and put down again when they are done. Our code isn’t burned on a disk, packaged up and then sent off to be sold at some superstore. We can’t just walk away when we’re tired of playing the game, or get a better offer from a cooler friend.
That’s not how it works when selling software as a SERVICE. We are building a relationship with every single person using our product and we have an obligation to take care of them. Not to legally cover our butts, but to really take care of our customers; to listen to how they are using our product, involve them in the implementation of our vision, to give ample warning if something unforeseen does happen, and do everything in our power to make sure they will be okay without us.
With this goal in mind, we at BatchBlue make the following pledge to our users:
- We value the information that you are trusting to our care.
- We will do all in our power to educate you on how to best use our system to manage your information.
- We understand that the information belongs to you and that you should have easy access to it at any time from anywhere.
- We will give you the time and tools to export your data, for whatever the reason.
- We keep service to you as our highest priority.
- We will keep improving our product.
We are in this for the long haul. We have big plans for our product and for anyone gracious enough to subscribe to our service. Thank you for your business; we continue to be honored to support you.
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CRM , Social CRM, Contact Manager, Address book on steroids, the ‘wow you guys really like blue’ app.
These are all terms we’ve heard to describe BatchBook and we agree with all of them. Another thing I would add to that list is “Your own dev team starting at $10 a month”. When you chose to purchase a BatchBook account, you’re buying much more than a place for your contacts. You’re buying a baseball stat-obsessed user interface designer, a Customer Service specialist who loves cats, and a karate chopping product manager among other things. You’re investing in a team of people who are work-obsessed and probably sleep too little.
The beauty of a SaaS (software as a service) offering is that your purchase does not stop bringing you benefits after your initial purchase. You’re buying into Batchblue and as such, our entire company is here to support you. Take a look at our forums as well as our series ‘Our Users Are So Smart’ to see our philosophy in action.
There’s been some press lately extolling the virtues of free web applications and services. While we agree you can get by on these to an extent, free can also cost you in terms of lack of support and not having a say in the direction of the product.
At BatchBlue, we’ve put a stake in the ground. We’re publicly saying that we will work hard, keep our prices low, provide stellar customer support and deliver an application that is constantly being refined and advanced at no extra cost to you. We feel strongly that there is real value in that and hope that you agree.
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Tags: batchbook, crm
Now that we’ve hit BatchBook 1.0, it’s time to start looking at what 2.0 will be. To us, it means seeing how your contacts are interacting with and on the web. This translates to many things (syncing, sharing contact information with other apps, etc.) Each of our upcoming “social” features will more fully leverage the power of BatchBook and as a result, your contact network.
Feed Reader
For the first big addition in this more social direction, we’ve added a new SuperTag type: the Feed Reader. The Feed Reader SuperTag type lets you add any RSS feed, Twitter streams and Delicious streams to a SuperTag. You can add the Feed Reader to an existing SuperTag, or create a new SuperTag using new Feed Reader fields.
Here’s a screenshot of the Feed Reader in action. We’ve created a SuperTag called “social media” and added Feed Readers for personal blog, Twitter stream and delicious links. Currently, we show the last three updates to a feed and link back to the original feed source.
By adding feeds to a contact record, you can get a look at what they are up to on the web. You can even monitor a company’s brand using the Feed Reader. In our account, we’ve added the feed for Twitter search to our company record to keep up with any mentions on Twitter. Imagine having that information for all your clients right there on their contact record (editor’s note — maybe then they’ll start understanding all this crazy ’social media’ stuff!)
SuperTag Library
We’re also in the beta stages of getting SuperTag collections into a new SuperTag Library, which you can access from the main SuperTag tab in your BatchBook account. With one click, you can add a complete, pre-defined Supertag. These collections will be really useful as we continue to build them out for specific industries and job roles. If you’ve created any SuperTags that you think might be useful to others, please let us know if you’d like to share.
Thanks to all our customers for their continued support and input. We look forward to building BatchBook 2.0 with you!
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Tags: batchbook, crm, social crm
Our big update last night was enabling search and filtering across all your BatchBook data. Of course the biggest part of this was getting SuperTag data searchable. You can join criteria on and/or and automatically create lists or name the search and save it for later use. Plus the filters are smart so if you are search multiple choice data it gets pre-populated for you and date and number SuperTags get options like greater than and less than.
Personally this is the biggest update to BatchBook yet. SuperTags were already cool but now we are realizing just how powerful they can be. I am not one for naming versions of BatchBook but for me this is 1.0. The vision of what the base product offering was going to be has finally been realized.
Need to know who you have not contacted yet after that last conference, who has birthdays coming up, who a tagged with ‘customer’ and ‘invoice sent’. It is now easy to do just that. So go out and really get into you data cause it is the good stuff.
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Tags: batchbook, crm, social crm
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