I recently wrote about finding a new online contact management system named Batchbook and that I was going to give it a whirl this week. Well, it’s noon on day one and I’ve already deleted my Batchbook account.

I currently use Highrise HQ and while I like it, I feel that it should do something more for me. I’m not sure what, but it just seems to under deliver somehow. I know that’s not really helpful to anyone that wants to learn the direction that I think Highrise should take, but that’s the best way to describe it. It seems that there is so much freaking data in Highrise that I should be able to do more with it than just contact and communication management. Although, since I can’t seem to come up with what, exactly, I want it to do then perhaps I am getting all I need.

I mentioned that when I did the initial import into Batchbook of my contacts from a CSV exported from HighRise that Batchbook kind of made a mess of the import. It created a bunch of individuals that were actually organizations and then duplicated almost all of those individuals as organizations. I had to manually go through and delete all the dupes and then found out that all the contact info had been imported into the organization records and I was left with a bunch of individual contacts with no contact info. Blech.

I was also disappointed that none of my communications with my contacts had been imported, but that data may not have been present in the export to begin with – I haven’t checked.

So, what caused me to delete my account in a record three hours? It’s just plain old too unintuitive for me to get productive with. I get that any new app or service has a bit of a learning curve, but I feel that anything I am going to use has to ‘hook me’ by becoming almost immediately useful in some very basic ways. The Batchbook interface failed to let me figure out some obvious things quickly and left me with eyes frantically darting around the screen trying to figure out how to find the email or note that I just created.

I make good use of the email dropbox feature in that I forward milestone and direction emails from clients to their applicable contact record in Highrise (or Batchbook in this case). Unlike Highrise, however, it takes about 4 or 5 clicks in Batchbook to get to a communication stream for a given client from the dashboard. That’s kind of annoying.

I also found the Batchbook dashboard to be virtually useless. The Highrise dashboard shows me a list of my most recent activities such as emails or notes for my contacts. The Batchbook dashboard only shows me what I’ve done, not the data. By way of example, if I fire off an email from one of my clients to Highrise, then my dashboard in Highrise would show the client, the type of communication (email, in this case) and a few preview lines of the email. I can then click on the client name or the communication type to get to the client or the communication directly. The Batchbook dashboard just shows me that I sent in an email or that I edited a client record. It doesn’t show me what the communication is or what the edits were or really anything that I would consider useful. It’s my dashboard, I need it to do something more useful than tell me what I just did.

I’m painfully aware that I do not fit well with any CRM application because I am just plain old too small. With 40 – 50 contacts and only one user (me) I am not the target market of any of the online CRM offerings out there. I get the fact that if I were bigger, had staff, and hundreds of clients then the way Batchbook does business might make more sense. At the moment, however, that’s not the case and while Highrise still doesn’t fit exactly, it fits better than Batchbook for me right now.

Tags: batchbook, crm, highrise

Some related posts:

• October 13, 2008 -- Online Contact Management: Highrise HQ and Batchbook (4)
• January 7, 2010 -- Top 4 Web Apps I Cannot Live Without (5)