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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
This feature release is so big we’re taking the whole week to announce it! For the rest of the week, we will be highlighting some of the exciting new features in our BatchBook for Sales release, including a new tab for tracking Deals, an all-inclusive calendar and permissions-based access to your BatchBook contacts and communications.
We’ve worked hard over the past year and a half to bring the personal side of small business relationships into BatchBook. SuperTags allow you to build a richer profile of your customers, social media integration allows you to engage with them in a more personal and accessible way, and our Small Business Web partnerships provide a single source of information for all of the other systems you are using to run your business.
Now, we’ve combined this with the deals and leads tracking tools of enterprise sales management products so you can better understand how to turn these personal relationships into new customers. Share conversations across your team, track important action items and capture all signals your customers are sending out – whether a complimentary Tweet or a frustrated blog post.
At BatchBlue, we believe that open, on-going communication with your contacts is really the lifeblood of your business. With BatchBook for Sales, the sales pipeline just got a little more personal. Because you should never have to force a sale.
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Tags: contact management, crm, sales, small business CRM, Social Media
It’s September and back-to-school fever has hit the On-Boarding desk hard as my calendar is being flooded with appointments. It just seems natural as the kids are heading back to school that the rest of us decide to buckle down and take the time to really get organized.
Our On-Boarding program gives me the opportunity to talk with customers, listen to their needs and do a fair amount of problem-solving. I’ve been helping customers for over two years now and I find there are a few tips that I’m always giving out to those who are just getting started with BatchBook. I thought I’d share them here to make it easier for other new customers to start using BatchBook.
1) Download the Import Template. Importing is probably the first step you will take when setting up your new BatchBook account. We provide a BatchBook Import Template to help make this process as easy as possible. You’ll find the Import Template in the right-hand column of your Contacts tab page within BatchBook. Simply download the template to your desktop, fill it in and import away.
If you need to import data that does not fit under our template headers, you can do that, too. First, create custom fields (or as we call them, SuperTags) for your specific information. Once your SuperTags are created, download the template. You’ll now see columns for your SuperTag data. View a screencast. (Note that if you have created a multiple choice field type for your SuperTag, the data you are importing has to be an exact match or you will get an error. See more detailed template instructions here.)
2) Take a tour of our SuperTag Library. BatchBook is all about customization, but where do you start when thinking about creating your own, unique SuperTags? Answer: the SuperTag library on the Tags & SuperTags tab! We’ve also compiled some industry specific examples for you (Marketing, Real Estate, Design, Social Media) Give them a look; perhaps you can use them or maybe they will inspire you to create some of your own. You can edit or delete your tags or SuperTags at any time on your Tags & SuperTags tab.
3) Think about the reports you will want to create from your contacts. Another tip I like to give people is to think about the reports they will want to generate and to create their SuperTags based on that. It’s easy to create a quick report based on the data in your SuperTags. Want to know how many customer’s in the month of August took their summer vacations by car? No problem; done!
4) Use our support resources. We make it our mission to provide you with a high level of customer support and have included a great deal of helpful information on our website. Be sure to check out our screencasts and FAQs.
We also provide free bi-weekly webinars on getting started with BatchBook. Something I always tell folks is to be sure to check out our Forums. We have an active, super-smart community of BatchBook users who are always happy to help out, give tips, or talk about how they are using BatchBook. I learn a lot by reading the Forum posts; I’m sure you’ll find them helpful as well.
5) Learn more about our integration partners. BatchBook integrates with other applications in an effort to make your life easier. Take the time to learn more about any of our partners to take your BatchBook up a notch.
For more tips on organizing your data, our president Pamela O’Hara has written a helpful Blue Paper called Managing Your Contacts: The Business of Personal Relationships. Feel free to download it, share with your team and send us your feedback.
While most back-to-school talk these days revolves around first day jitters and uncomfortable new school shoes, I’m hoping that my back-to-BatchBook tips make the idea of contact management less scary and will even help you get an “A” in organization!
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Tags: contact management, crm, Customer Service, On-Boarding
We’re lucky to be working with Michelle Wolverton, a virtual assistant who runs her own VA company over at chelpixie.com. Here Michelle gives you her thoughts on data management from a virtual assistant’s point of view. She is tremendously organized and has some great tips for how BatchBook can help you be the same. — BatchBlue
A personal assistant and project manager is often times expected to respond quickly and efficiently to handle task communicated by clients who like to communicate in many different ways. Clients email me, call, tweet and sometimes even text message me to handle things on the fly. In the beginning, this wasn’t urgent, I could keep track of tasks in my personal spreadsheet program and know what needed to be done and where I could contact the client as needed.
Business has grown and I’ve looked at several new management options of keeping track of incoming information versus searching spreadsheets (or sometimes even gmail) for something I need to find immediately to get my task done. I not only need to know a clients contact information, but details of projects or FTP information or passwords.
I’ve tried many methods, using 37 signals products, Salesforce, even Microsoft Sharepoint on a Mac! Lately I’ve been using BatchBook to help me accomplish things and keep details organized.
Some of the ways I use BatchBook include:
Clients don’t always hand me the details I need in order to get an urgent task done quickly. When I need to know the best way to contact them, I check their contact page on BatchBook. The social media super tag gives me the ability to add more than just their phone number and email but also their Twitter stream and blog. I’m able to tell quickly the best way to follow up with clients given whatever they may be doing at the moment.
Tracking leads is an essential part of any web worker’s job. In order to keep business flowing, responding quickly to new leads and keeping track of the conversation and follow up keeps business healthy and thriving. I use the communications tab to log any information I’ll need later about client and potential client communication. Need to remember to follow up? Create a new to do. It’s always a reminder to me to make sure I get in contact later.
Often times I’m on the go, sometimes traveling or just across town at a meeting, I can always access BatchBook using my iPhone and web browser. Being a web worker, anything that allows me to work using cloud computing makes my heart happy.
As a consultant regarding social media practices, I communicate almost constantly and am always meeting new people. With so many connections over different networks, I make copies of contact information that I own on my hard drive to sync it all up, but also keep it all in BatchBook. Yes, in one of those what-if scenarios, if the unthinkable happens and Twitter disappears overnight or Facebook is suddenly shut down then I’m ready to go.
These are just some of the ways I use CRM (and my choice BatchBook) to keep me moving at a steady pace. I’d love to hear some of your ideas for keeping track of clients and tasks. Always open to learning new ways to be even more efficient, saving both myself and my clients more time!
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, crm, organization, virtual assistant
It’s 2009 and like many of you, we’re getting our virtual house in order. One of the things we’ve wanted to do for a while is provide webinars for our new customers. Oh sure, we’ve got killer screencasts and the best darn Customer On-Boarding Specialist anyone could ask for; this will be just another great tool in your arsenal for learning to better manage your contacts using BatchBook.
We know that even with the best intentions, getting started can feel overwhelming. We want to give our folks every chance to succeed. It’s fun once you get into, really! And so useful — every day I’m amazed at the cool stuff I can do with my BatchBook account.
Our first webinar is scheduled for Friday, January 16th at 2pm EST. It will cover the basics of using BatchBook, including importing, adding and editing contact information, logging communications, creating To-Dos and using Lists & Reports. Since this will be our first ever webinar, there may be a few kinks to work out. But we expect to cover a lot of ground PLUS you’ll have the undivided attention of folks who want to help you all for the low low cost of…free!
If you would like to be a part of our inaugural On-boarding webinar, please drop a quick note with your name and email address to onboarding@batchblue.com. We’ll send you a meeting invite with complete information within the next few days.
We’re very much looking forward to all that 2009 is going to bring. Thank you for being a part of it.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, webinar
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