Inspired by Chris Brogan’s Rockstar badges and by the special request of some of our more ardent admirers, we’re pleased to announce BatchBadges! These are little badges you can post to your website or blog that will display not only your love for BatchBook, but also how smart and well-organized you are. Nothing says “I’m a savvy business professional” like a well-organized contact network!
Please feel free to choose your favorite from the ones below. And thanks so much for being a part of the BatchBlue community.
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.
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.
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.
Being raised in the deep south, I had the amused pleasure of attending a few debutante parties in my youth. A rather anachronistic occasion where the highly motivated, accomplished young female leaders of their time were introduced to the elder matchmakers of Atlanta society, as if still in need of some husband finding before making a success of their life. I’ve noticed a similar disconnect between the empowered customers of today and the outdated CRM tools that try to force a relationship of advantageous value. Just as the self-sufficient debs ignored the pointless advice, today’s customers bypass the marketing browbeat. For this reason, we have worked to redefine the role of a small business CRM product in the customer relationship process.
So I was excited to attend Brent Leary’s discussion on Social CRM at the recent Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston. Brent is the co-founder of CRM-essentials.com, a leader in small business CRM evolution and, I learned, a very nice guy. He pointed out that the traditional CRM method was to record and analyze data around the sales process of of an organization – an operational tool, if you will. Brent called it a “customer information management” tool. An important resource for the business, but not a very romantic relationship builder.
Brent explained that the customer of today not only has the power of purchasing, she has the power of blogging or tweeting or otherwise spreading the word – good or bad – about your product. She is a social customer. The real opportunity, he argues, is with a company willing to engage with this social customer before, during and especially after the actual sales transaction. Brent makes so many great points, it is worth a listen (or two) for anyone wanting to understand new ways to use the social media tools now available to build a longer relationship with a customer.
I appreciate the chance to hear Brent. We at BatchBlue are very ardent believers in the power of social media to strengthen the relationship with customers and will be introducing some new features in BatchBook soon to help make this process easier.
