The New Batchbook: Contacts
- Posted August 15th, 2011
- Filed under: BB2, Using BatchBook
We started the rebuilding of our Batchbook product at the very heart of the application: the contacts tab. This is where you can see all of the people in your network, dig deeper into their interests and backgrounds, follow the conversations and interactions you are having with them and keep track of the special things that make them tick. Really get to know them better.
This should be the easy stuff, right? It’s just names and addresses. Well, a few addresses. And phone. And by phone I mean home, work, the other work, cell, fax, 800#, and international. And also e-mail. Make that a couple of e-mails. And websites. That can be company, personal, blog, or wiki. And don’t forget the social. Facebook profiles, both personal and business. And if it is a business also the brands and contests and causes and events and places. And Twitter. Both the individual and their company and possibly their dog. And LinkedIn and Google+ and Flickr and so many more. And multiply all of this by 2 or 3 or 4 for everyone in your network who freelances/owns/volunteers for multiple companies.
You see where I am going with this. It is actually deliciously complex keeping up with the who’s and where’s of your personal and professional networks. But the thing is, the time it took you to read all of the types of information we are collecting is probably more than you will have on any given day when you need to find it quick! And it is only going to be helpful if you, your team or the magic syncing elves have been keeping the information up to date. So while it’s fantastic that there is so much information to collect, it is even more important that it be easy to get to and easy to update.
With this in mind, our redesign is about Cleaning It Up and Speeding It Up. I will continue to update you on some of the new features and updates that we are rolling out with The New BatchBook as we finalize different components. In Contacts, this translates to:
1. Easier to manage contact information. Smarter display of contact details that accommodates the proliferation of email, phone, web, and even postal addresses for your contacts. Easy to act on and easy to edit.
2. Rebuilt the back end. New and improved database infrastructure to speed up all parts of the application. We whipped this thing into shape (have you ever seen a DB do push-ups?) and it’s going to greatly improve your day to day experience of Batchbook.
3. Fewer clicks. Improved browse display with a better and more detailed preview. Easily send a message, add a to-do, print their profile, etc.
4. Improved usability. We’ve given the interface itself a once (or twice or thrice) over to keep the things that are important easy to find. Most importantly, we want anyone who uses Batchbook to be able to quickly find what they are looking for.
These are just of few of the high level changes that we are making. And while you can see some exciting new components here, remember that this is still a work in progress, so some things will continue to change.
Join the conversation on our brand new forums. We invite you to tell us what you think of the new Contacts features. We won’t be implementing every suggestion, but this rewrite will allow us to be much more responsive to feature requests going forward. So to further help the effort, we are launching a brand new BatchBlue Community forums to help us better communicate and gather information about the suggestions you have for Batchbook.
Great job Batchblue team!
Love the color scheme. I’m happy that speed is a top priority.
Please post another image of the lower portion of hte contacts page!
It definitely looks interesting. I can’t wait to see what all you’ve done here. I’m glad you guys are really focusing on Speed because I’m noticing that with almost every web app I use, the Speed of the user interface is getting better and better. I’m glad BatchBlue is on this train too…
Great work – looks like the update will be a great improvement to usability – seems from the photo that you are adding the ability to have a person be in more than one company?! – this will improve how we use business hugely although the holy grail would be adding smart url tags as per http://support.batchbook.com/discussions/contacts/41-using-data-in-website-urls – would allow easy customisation and integration with other web sites and online systems by creating smart links to them with the data already stored in batchbook
While I agree that speed is a top priority…
The small preview that you have given us raises a couple of questions…
For those of us that monitor activity… (comments, and activity log)… I don’t see any of this. I don’t think you would have taken this away, but the very fact that I can’t see this is concerning, in that the activity is what we monitor, not the contact information. We like the fact that the contact information is only a small portion… its the conversations and discussions with our contacts that we focus on…
And will you still allow us to drag and drop the contact objects? I hope so.
Hi, I am in the process of selecting a CRM, because we’ve topped out Google apps labeling system as an effective CRM system. Every single CRM we’ve looked at has drawbacks which drive me just enough of a little crazy. Batchbook is one of my top contenders in it’s current form, so my question, like everyone else, is when, when, when will the new version be released? More importantly, there are a number of features that I ever-so-desire in a CRM, and have my fingers crossed that they might be in the new version. Can’t you leak a hint of a roadmap as to some of the features you are working on? Most importantly to me are tighter gmail messaging integration (since the api exists now), better email notification system for comments posted that people are assigned to (huge). And hopefully we’ll see much more speed utilizing JS/ajax posting and instant, in-window, notifiactions.
A big function missing is the ability to select multiple contacts and send an email….
Also Company address should be added by default to any contact belonging to the company
Thx
the longer this takes, the more likely I am to move to another CRM. almost all are starting to integrate social so you’re not the big deal anymore you once were, and others have much sleeker interfaces.
i’ve been using batchbook for almost two months and am already tired of the clunky interface and feel (such as doing simple things like editing tasks), and I don’t need the social stuff taking up half my screen real estate or more – a nice mouseover with linkedin or twitter info would be much nicer.
giving this one more month then I am cancelling my account. in the meantime, I am testing other CRMs again in google apps marketplace that have made the leap to social.
I would highly recommend giving some drop down options for the deals area: such as a list that sorts them by date. Alphabetically doesn’t work for me at all..Its a little frustrating when you have a lot of deals going on and trying to scroll down till to find the deal that was just posted. Looking forward to the grand “new” opening. Can we get the new version earlier than planned..lol
Love it. And Joem? Get a grip. we get amazing software for $15 bucks.
Arrgh, I was pretty happy with Batchbook for a while, but now it’s starting to irritate. It’s takes forever to export contact lists larger than a few dozen people, importing seems to be a sketchy prospect at best and also takes forever, servers are slow, Mailchimp integration is nothing special. It’s unfortunate, because I had high hopes for BB.
I recommend BB all the time in my classes and to my clients, but the limitations are getting a little tiresome. For one, it’s still really slow. So when is the new release coming? And when will you have a better app for iOS? For example, there’s not way to look up a phone number unless you’re online. So now I’m thinking of exporting all my contacts to an address book or something. Awk-ward.
What about 2-way Google Contacts Sync?
I’m a big fan of your software, but without 2 way sync my salespeople just weren’t using it.
Until that happens, I’m afraid I won’t be a customer…
I agree 100% with David’s post: “Company address should be added by default to any contact belonging to the company” this would cut down on additional data entry. PLEASE MAKE THIS HAPPEN!!!
Aside of that, tighter integration with Google Apps (especially business apps users) would be greatly appreciated, admired, and talked about!
Cheers,
Phil
I’ve been looking for a new CRM to replace a really old copy of ACT!. I want try Batchbook, but am just concerned that there is enough depth/resources at the company to justify the commitment. The fun-loving quirky attitude is nice and all that, but I just want the software to work well and fast.
Glad to see speed is a priority.
Does Batchbook plan to focus on real usability? It’s a best practice to offer user selectable skins / themes, especially to offer a high contrast one so that people with less than perfect vision or working, on a portable device, or in high glare environment can actually read the screen.
For some having this is a convenience, but for the visually impaired it can make the difference between being able to use the service or not.
In this day and age of CSS it really is easy for companies like Batchbook to offer this, it would only take about an hour of programming, if that, to code another skin in higher contrast. So hopefully Batcbhook will do the right thing.
Major thanks for the article.Really looking forward to read more. Great.
I agree with Rich. The value of the software is the ability of the company to stand behind the product. I’ve got to say I’m questioning my investment in Batchbook. The lack of communication with it’s customers is ridiculous. I should have to remember to go to a blog to find out that the platform functionality is being totally rebuilt. And, frankly I don’t care about the updates to what is happening with the ‘new’ platform until it is actually out and functioning because I see that design changes to the profiles have yet to happen.
So telling customers about how pretty the profiles are going to look like in August but the platform isn’t going to be updated until after January 1, 2012 is a bunch of nonsense. What happens when you can’t deliver on the promise of the launch date?
Common sense Marketing 101 says don’t tell your customers about new products/services until you acting have beta tested them and they are ready to launch; otherwise you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and failure.
Furthermore, Marketing 101 says you need to use multiple channels to communicate with your audience because your audience may not be listening in the channels your communicating in or at the times you are sending your messages. People don’t know that you have a blog or have posted a new blog post unless you tell them about it.
Have you people forgotten the purpose of EMAIL?
What do I need to do to start playing in this sandbox / using the upcoming version? Mucho Thanko for all the hard work and cool product mojo y’all are putting out!
Chandler
Hopefully the new version will show an improvement in todos and, especially, Deals. Until now, deals are very limited and inflexible in Batchbook and so it’s not been worthwhile to use them. The lack of flexibility would be a major reason to leave.
http://www.allclients.com has a great implementation of customizable deals templates that would be worth looking at.
[...] closing in on the release of the new version. At this point we have finalized development of the contacts, custom fields and search and lists (see more below). And we are finishing up development of the [...]