Webinars make your fingers go faster!
You may have had the chance to work with our amazing Customer Service and Onboarding Specialist Stephanie Sweeney. Did you know that she also runs our Webinar program? At least twice a month, Stephanie provides free online training on how to better use BatchBook to run your business. Recent topics include “Using BatchBook for Fun & Profit”, “BatchBook for Sales” and “The Small Business Webinar”, which looks at how BatchBook integrates with some other cool small business web apps like MailChimp, Freshbooks, Zendesk and Shoeboxed. And there’s always a Q&A session at the end, so you can ask specific questions that you may have about how you’re using BatchBook.
Register now for today and next week
The schedule can be found on our Onboarding page, but I’ll save you the click. Today at 2pm ET we’ve got “Using BatchBook for Fun & Profit” (which is kind of our BatchBook 101) and next Thursday, January 28th at 2pm ET is the very popular “Small Business Webinar“. Click the title of the session to register.
We encourage you to check out a webinar if you haven’t had a chance to. If you can’t make it, we have some recorded and posted on the Onboarding page for viewing at your leisure. And we will be adding more in upcoming weeks.
We’re always looking for ways to help our customers succeed with our product. Please let us know what webinar you’d like to see and maybe we’ll add it to our webinar schedule!
UPDATE: Due to a scheduling conflict, the Small Business Webinar date has been moved to Thursday, February 4th at 2pm EST. Still plenty of time to register here!
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Tags: batchbook, Community, Customer Service, training, tutorial, webinar
We’ve put together a new program here at BatchBlue. You see, as we’ve grown our product and our relationships with the folks who are using it, we came to realize there are some very smart people out there who are coming up with some ingenious ways to set up and use BatchBook for their various CRM needs.
We wanted to introduce you to the folks who we know from their involvement in our forums or with our customer service team as expert BatchBook users. They each have experience setting up BatchBook accounts for themselves and their own clients, and are now available to help our users with some of the more advanced functions in BatchBook such as:
- Prepping database and spreadsheet files and importing them into BatchBook.
- Setting up custom fields using SuperTags and importing custom data from other systems.
- Developing custom reports and lists.
- Writing scripts to connect the BatchBook API to other products such as e-commerce forms, blog site, etc.
- Using the BatchBook API to migrate data from other CRM systems
We borrowed this idea (with their blessing) from our friends at MailChimp.com, who have had their own successful experts program in place for a while now. Also — special thanks to our Lead Expert Scott Blitstein from eSeMBe.com for helping us put this program together.
Please check out our newly vetted experts. If you’d like some help with your own BatchBook account, feel free to contact them directly for more information on their services and rates. And, if you think you have what it takes to guide our users through the wonderful world of BatchBook, you can learn more about the Experts program and apply here. Whooo knows? One day you could be BatchBook Expert, too!
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Tags: batchbook, crm, Customer Service, customers, experts, small business CRM
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
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
Here’s a quick round-up of some posts from users and reviewers of BatchBook.
Adam & Cheap Trick: A match made in CS heaven
If you’ve ever spent any time in the BatchBlue Forums, you’ve probably experienced the magic that is Adam Darowski. Adam is our User Experience designer known for his passion for good design, our customers and music. So the fact that he crafted an email to someone who was considering BatchBook that included a link to a Cheap Trick song came as no surprise to any of us. But the (potential) customer was so impressed, he wrote up a blog post about it, which was tweeted all around the socialsphere. And the best thing is that we have a new customer who appreciates our sense of humor.
Bedazzled by BatchBook brilliance
Robert Mattar wrote up a nice piece over at Posterous about his experience searching for a CRM that would work well for small businesses. His conclusion? He calls BatchBook “one of the most versatile and affordable applications” out there and even calls us “brilliant” in the post’s title. Thanks, Robert, we’re so glad BatchBook is working out for you since we think small businesses are where it’s at!
We love lists
People love lists and so do we, especially when we are on them! So here goes:
- Our friend (and frequent @sbbuzz participant) Bradford Shimp posted this cool list of 9 Businesses to Follow and Get to Know on Twitter. He has fabulous things to say about BatchBlue, our @sbbuzz weekly chat session, and our own Queen Bee, Pamela!
- One of our favorite small business marketing gurus, John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing, mentioned us as a way to keep track of your customers’ social media activities.
- And last but never least, social media pirate Chris Brogan reveals what’s in his software booty chest (including BatchBook) in his recent post entitled A Quick and Inconclusive List of Software I Like.
It’s a fine time for wine: Cruvee/VinTank Case study
We’re also really excited to have our first full-blown case study posted on the site. Meet Cruvee/VinTank: VinTank, which solutions for selling and marketing wine in the digital age. One of VinTank’s portfolio companies, Cruvee, provides business intelligence and performance management services for the wine industry. Our case study delves into the specifics of how they are using BatchBook.
We’re looking forward to adding more case studies in the upcoming weeks. Drop us a line if you’re using BatchBook to help manage and grow your business and would like to be featured on our homepage – we’d love to share your story.
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Tags: @sbbuzz, batchbook, chris brogan, Customer Service, john janstch, small business, small business CRM, social crm
