New BatchBook Feature: Send to A Friend
- Posted July 7th, 2010
- Filed under: Product Updates, Using BatchBook
The latest cool little feature we snuck into BatchBook has been a pet project of mine for a while. So much so that I get to be the one to announce it!
Have you ever been working in BatchBook and thought “Oh, I’d love to send someone this person’s contact information”? Recently, I had an editor friend looking for a freelance writer for a project. I clicked on my “writer” tag in BatchBook, took a quick look at the resultant list and found someone I thought would be perfect for the job. But I had no way to send that person’s information from BatchBook, so I had to cut and paste everything into a separate email. Kind of a bummer since all the info my friend needed (name, email and street address, phone number) was right there on the contact detail page.
Thanks to some back-end wizardry, you can now send a person’s contact information directly from BatchBook just by clicking on this last little icon on the Contact detail toolbar:
<== hello!
Once you click, just add the recipient’s email address to the drop-down bar and the vcard information is zipped off to your friend. This is also great for those times when you want to make a virtual introduction between two folks. With this new feature, you’re off and networking in no time. It’s just a quick little thing that adds up to a bit of a time-saver, which is always nice.
A big thanks to the BatchBlue tech team for making my BatchBook dream a reality! Now, who in my network needs an introduction to whom…?
This is neat. similar to an idea I had for a ‘public list’.
e.g. our website has a list of ‘stockists’. Rather than having to manually update this list, I’d like to be able to use a ‘view’ of an existing list on BatchBook (e.g. a view of all ‘companies’ tagged ‘stockist’)
Michelle… I can’t even imagine how pumped you are to get that in there. Great to see these subtle-but-oh-so-useful enhancements keep coming!
Thanks Adam! I’m glad you can fully understand my excitement
@Alex – that is a good idea. Not sure we can get to it anytime soon, but I like it! You never know…
I wonder if you can add the ability to include a personal message? Auto message is OK, but perhaps a little spammy??
@Alex I think the personal message would take more doing. Understand about the message concern, though. We’re going to move the BB stuff to below the sig black so it’s not part of the actual message. Thanks for the feedback!
Hi Michelle!
and congratulations!
Thanks
Kisses,
Pedro
Just the kinda thing I have been dreaming of. I was getting sick & tired of the silly cut/paste job I was forced to do every time a client asked for an applicant’s detail. But unfortunately I still cant use it. Because the email goes from Batchbook – not from me.
Industrial strength marketing material from Batchblue on a Vcard email isn’t going to be very helpful. A simple: “Powered by Batchbook” would be subtle and do the same work.
This sounded really cool at first, but I was disappointed when I saw that it: a) comes from Batchbook’s address b) Includes a sales-focused message from Batchbook c) Doesn’t allow for a custom message.
I was really hoping it was going to simply drop the contact info as text into the body of an email in my default email client. Or at least copy the info to the clipboard. It does get really tedious copying eight or more fields to get someone’s contact info out of Batchbook.
I don’t mean to knock the effort I’m sure it took for this addition. But without a custom message this is only useful if the recipient is already expecting the contact info, and still doesn’t help if we need to paste the info into the header of a typed letter.
On a sidenote, what is that green leaf in the screenshot? That must be another new feature coming up since I don’t have it in mine.
I just tried out the new feature and think it is great! I like that BatchBlue actually listens to its customer and adds truly usable features. Keep up the good work.
Hey… nice work… you guys are great… party hearty and have a great upcoming week!
Thank you for the sweet message! Appreciate it Nikita and glad you are finding it useful.
Hi Justin – thanks for the comment. We hear you about the custom message option and it’s something we can look into, although we’ve got a lot on our plate at present.
The green leaf is the Freshbooks icon: if you’ve activated sync service with a freshbooks.com account, this will appear on your contact records. You can learn all about it here: http://batchblue.com/freshbooks.html