BatchBook Blog
Archive for Tag
Some of us spent last weekend overlooking the Charles River from the beautiful offices of the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge, MA.
The occasion? BarCamp Boston. We’re big fans of Camps in general. WordCamp, NewbCamp, PodCamp, Summer Camp.
What’s BarCamp? “… an international network of user-generated conferences (or unconferences). They are open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.” According to Wikipedia. To us, they’re a great opportunity to spend a day or two with some of the smartest and most creative people we’ve ever met.
Like most unconferences, BarCamps start with a bunch folks putting up post-it notes on topics they’d like to present or discuss. The crowd votes with some checkmarks on the post-its and the topics with the most votes get moved the schedule. Easy peasy. The topics this past weekend included nuclear fission, BBQ, the US Educational System and how to run your business like Genghis Khan ran his empire. You never know what you’re going to get, but you can rest assured that it will be awesome. (more…)
Tags: barcamp, boston, grasshopper, mailchimp, shopify, wufoo
The new version of our MailChimp sync has been out for a few weeks now and for the most part it’s been going really well. However, there have been some issues with groups so we’ve had to take a step back and take another look at the problem. Unfortunately, this means that we will have to turn off group syncing. It was just proving difficult to keep them in sync and was causing some big problems for our international customers especially.
First name, last name email, subscribed will continue to stay in sync and the dashboard and contact detail widgets will remain – just groups are turned off for now. Existing customers will still have the group sync enabled but once that sync is deleted, it will no longer work.
We hate taking features away but thought it best in this case, as it was causing too many edge-case issues. We’re going to take another look at groups and come up with a better way to do this in the future.
Our sincere apologies for the change. If you have some ideas on how you think we could improve the sync going forward, please let us know. We look forward to making the MailChimp integration work at its full capacity for all of our customers.
Tags: batchbook, integration, mailchimp
Last week’s trip to Atlanta was a whirlwind of Realtors, Batchbook customers and monkeys (more on that later!). Pamela and I were there to attend the 4th annual ReTech South conference, where Pamela was presenting on panel with some other Small Business Web friends.
The thing that struck me the most about the conference was the great enthusiasm and energy from both attendees and presenters. Pamela and I attended a different real estate conference a few years ago, and I was amazed at how far the industry has come in terms of its adoption of technology in general and social media specifically. Most of the sessions were standing-room only, as panelists discussed ways to use blogs to attract leads, using Facebook to build network and of course, how web applications can help grow their businesses. Plus, you will not meet a nicer, more network group of people than Realtors. These guys are definitely in our wheelhouse!
Here’s some thoughts on the conference from Realtor Jim Duncan, who made a short video while driving home from the conference. Please note: we do not condone videotaping and driving!
(more…)
Tags: batchblue, mailchimp, small business
BatchBlue is on the road again, this time heading to Atlanta to attend the Real Estate & Technology Conference & Expo (RETech South). Pamela will be speaking on a panel about The Small Business Web and using cloud services with MailChimp, Expensify and IfByPhone. I’ll be there, too, armed with lots of stickers, shirts and stories and talking to folks about how they’re using Batchbook to manage their real estate contacts. If there was ever a well-connected group of folks, it’s Realtors! And judging from photos of past conferences, they’re fun, too. We like that.
We can’t wait to meet some Realtors doing cool things with technology in the real estate industry. We’ve even re-vamped our Batchbook for Real Estate page and added a new case study so folks can see how one tech-savvy Realtor is using a variety of web-based services to run his real estate agency.
As always, we’re interested in meeting our friends and customers, so if you are going to be there please let us know! We may put together a hosted Drink-up Thursday night – follow us on Twitter (twitter.com/batchblue) for details as they shape up.
Tags: batchblue, batchbook, Community, mailchimp, real estate, realtors
When is the last time you were truly delighted as a customer? We asked ourselves this question during a recent customer experience brainstorming session. One BatchBluer had been given a free cookie after she bought her daily lunch from our L’Artisan, our favorite local deli. Another had received a card from a store on his birthday. And the experience that stuck out for me was when I mentioned to the manager of clothing boutique Clad In that I had lost a necklace I recently purchased and she immediately gave me another one, free of charge.
In each of these examples, they were all little things, but they were all unexpected. The merchants at these various small businesses did something extra that resulted in a positive experience for their respective customers. So we started thinking – what are some other ways we could really wow our customers and show them how much they mean to us? We came up with a pretty good list, so as we would with a box of chocolate or other delicious snack, we thought we’d share.
1. Provide an experience, not just service. We call the folks who help our customers the Customer Experience team, not customer support or customer service. That’s because our team does more than answer questions: they play an active part in educating and empowering our customers on how to best use our product via webinars, providing 1-on-1 onboarding sesssions, writing blog posts and much more. You want your customers to have a good experience with your company so you should actively work to give them one.
2. Shout your customer love from the rooftops. We know our customers are awesome and we want others to know as well. When we see someone doing something exceptionally cool, we’ll reach out to them and ask if they’d like to be featured in a case study or a blog post. We have a whole website section called BatchMakers that’s devoted to people who are using our API. Think of ways you can shine the spotlight on your customers. Whether it’s on your website or a picture on a bulletin board in your shop, people love to be recognized for what they do.
(more…)
Tags: batchblue, Customer Service, freshbooks, mailchimp, small business, Social Media
Older Entries
