Category: 
October 13, 2008
I have recently noticed that there is a bit of a gap in the online customer/contact management services available in that there are not a lot of CRM services out there for small companies with 50 or so contacts There are a lot of solutions, both hosted and otherwise, for large companies with hundreds of employees and thousands of contacts/customers, but tussling with them is just too big a job for me to bother with.
Several weeks ago I stumbled across Highrise HQ from 37 Signals and it kind of fit the bill. At least, it fit the bill close enough that I have been using it for a little while now. It took me a little while to wrap my head around the fact that I don’t need to maintain an address book and a CRM – a good CRM will bring address book functionality to the table with it. That’s good because I need another app to look after like I need another hole in my head. I’m also happy to see that another staple of most CRMs is a to-do list so I can ditch Remember the Milk as well (although at the expense of losing my Blackberry sync by virtue of my RMilk Pro account).
Quite possibly the handiest thing about Highrise is the ‘email drop box’. This is a feature that allows me to forward or cc/bcc an email to my Highrise account where it will automagically be attributed to the contact who originally sent it to me within the Highrise communication stream for that client. If the contact does not exist, Highrise will create a contact and insert the email into the new contact’s communication stream.
I’ve enjoyed Highrise, but have found already that I want it to do more. It’s just too plain, too simple, and too close to being ‘not quite useful enough. I’m not sure what else I want it to do, but since I find myself in there all day long, I just wish there was more it could deliver.
I stumbled across Batchbook today thanks to a post on Mashable and have created a free-level account to see how it works for me. I’ve only been playing with it for a few minutes and a good plus and a bad minus have already become apparent.
On the plus side, Batchbook supports the ‘email drop box’ feature and it seems to function as it does on Highrise. That’s a huge plus because I have become used to sending important decision or milestone emails to Highrise to record them in my client’s contact stream. On the bad side, the CVS import I did of my Highrise contacts into Batchbook was pretty ugly. Batchbook evidently tries to make intelligent decisions about which contacts are companies and which contacts are individuals, and it didn’t do it very well. The first thing I had to do was delete a whole bunch of companies which were imported as people, and now I have to search through all my contacts to find out who is missing. However, since I only imported 40 contacts from Highrise, that’s not the end of the world so I’m game in order to see how well Batchbok works for me.
I’ve learned one thing over time about any kind of service and that is that only time will tell how good it is. I’ll start using Batchbook tomorrow through the course of my business and see how it really works for me. It looks promising, the free account level looks a little more robust than Highrise, and it seems zippy. As I use it and get to know it better, I will post my experiences.
Tags: 37 signals, batchbook, crm, highrise
Horaayy..there are 4 comment(s) for me so far ;)
[...] recently wrote about finding a new online contact management system named Batchbook and that I was going to give it a [...]
Hi Jon,
I’m currently using Highrise and thinking of switching to Batchbook, because of the supertags and customization.
Which do you prefer, now that you’ve used both for a few weeks?
Hi Mary,
I didn’t like Batchbook at all. Here’s a link to my post about my experiences:
http://www.slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com/2008/10/batchbook-a-disappointment/
Hi, we use Salesnexus as an online CRM and we are quite happy with it. It has Email capture as well, so you might check it out to see if it would work for you.