BatchBook Blog
Archive for the “User Experience” Category
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
You may have noticed that your BatchBook account looks a lot different today!
While we have revamped features every now and then, we’ve never done a full design overhaul of BatchBook. Until now.
First, here’s how it looks:
(click the image to go to a slideshow on Flickr)
We’re not fans of redesign for the sake of redesign, and there were lots of goals for this change. Some of the driving factors:
- A lighter design. The previous design had a lot of boxes with thick borders and background colors. This was fine when we tended to have one main column and a couple sidebar items. But as BatchBook has matured, we have added more useful features. The pages were starting to get heavy and this certainly lightens them up.
- Better use of space. The boxes in the previous design had rounded corners with padding… and internal rounded corners with padding… and then some more padding. A lot of space was being allocated to… not much. Now everything has a lot more breathing room.
- Faster, faster! My favorite thing to point out about this redesign is that we deleted a whole lot more code than we added. As a result, BatchBook uses far less javascript and images, so it runs a lot faster.
- SuperCute Quick Add. With all of this space that we gained, I decided to take some of it and invest it in promoting a feature that didn’t get enough real estate last time. Instead of a skinny little dropdown menu, Quick Add has a click-reducing icon approach. Because our users are so smart, I tip my hat to forum user Kenny for inspiring this change.
- And more to come! Let’s just say this design is far more flexible, and that will allow us (and you!) to do more things with it. Stay tuned!
Just to touch on some other updates that happened over the past week or so:
- As mentioned on the blog already, you can now complete To-Dos from the Activity Log.
- The very same Live Search that we have for Contacts and Communications is also available for the To-Do List.
- A personal favorite, when you export contacts to vCard or CSV, each person’s contact info will be combined with her/his company contact data. So, when I export my own contact record, not only do I get my personal and work email addresses and phone numbers, I also get BatchBlue’s main phone line and fax number.
- Finally, when you export to CSV, you can choose to include a contact’s tags in that export.
We hope you like the new changes! And we have so much more up our sleeves… 
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Tags: batchbook, design, small business CRM
Our BatchBook Screencasts page has been updated with a half dozen new screencasts. There is one screencast for each component of BatchBook (like Contacts or SuperTags) but also a whole new All About BatchBook screencast that combines all five components into one whirlwind tour of the app.
Note: We have updated all of our screencasts. You can find them on the Screencasts page.
Oh yes, you saw that right. There is also an iPod compatible version of each screencast. So, when you’re on the bus and you think to yourself “oh man, how do I attach a To-Do to a contact record again?”, just fire up your iPod and find out.
From time to time, we’ll also record a short screencast to showcase a particular feature, like we did with BatchBox email forwarding. Can you think of any others we should cover? Let us know!
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Tags: batchbook, screencasts
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