Posts Tagged ‘CRM’

Cool Apps: Xobni Puts Organization Back into Email

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Beyond all the cool, new apps that do cool new things, there are some apps that help us transform the bread and butter mundane things that are critical to our everyday business processes.

Take Email. Though obviously not a new and exciting technology, few of us can live without it. The problem is, it’s often inefficient and sucks up a lot of time maintaining it. What if there was an app that helped us organize it and allowed us to mine its rich data as well – the currency of our modern livelihood?

Ask and you shall receive. Xobni turns your inbox inside out – in a good way. The Outlook plug-in simplifies email management and helps you make the most of your email and time spent on it. It’s easier, faster and more intuitive than your standard out-of-the-box inbox.

What does Xobni really do? It enables faster, more accurate search of your inbox, for starters. And it brings together contact information right beside every email message.

Xobni’s best feature is the easy access it grants to information you will use. For instance, say you get an email from someone whose contact info has not been stored in your contacts folder. No need! Just glance over at the side of the email and you’ll see this person’s contact info nicely organized for your use. You’ll also see links to their Facebook and Twitter accounts if they have them.

OK, this feature may be even better: trends reporting. See who sends you the most email, who sends the most email that you delete without reading, who sends the most email that you consistently respond to. Folks, this is real-time intelligence for your email, which, if used right, can cut some serious time suck that clogs up your life.

Best of all? Xobni requires no additional input from the user. You just plug in and poof … you’re off and running. It’s kind of like slapping a CRM tool right into your Outlook. Only now you don’t have to mess with importing contacts and learning a new platform.

Xobni’s basic version is free and it costs $29.95 for the Plus version. The company also recently launched a mobile version for the Blackberry that costs a one-time charge of $9.99.

Don’t hate email, but do make it smarter and work harder for you. You’ll be much happier for it.


Cool Apps: Don’t Be Blue, Get BatchBook!

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Each and every day, it seems that there’s a new social media channel on which we need to keep tabs. Whether it’s making professional connections on LinkedIn, managing our personal Facebook profiles, our “fan” pages, Twitter feeds, FourSquare checkins, not to mention email, and the things we use to make sure we’re meeting the needs of our clients, there’s an endless stream of, well…streams to monitor.

How can we do it without sacrificing our work ethic or our commitment to providing the highest quality work to our customers and clients?

BatchBook may just be your answer.

BatchBook, developed by the big thinkers over at BatchBlue Software, features contact management, social media monitoring, email forwarding, communications tracking, to-do lists, the ability to create lists, reports, and Web forms, and integrates seamlessly with Google Contacts, Freshbooks, MailChimp, Shoeboxed, and Zendesk. These features, combined with some of BatchBook’s unique offerings, might make it the most powerful social monitoring/CRM tool around.

First and foremost, BatchBook is a contact management powerhouse. It makes it possible for you to track your business, personal, and social media contacts and share them, if you like, with team members or coworkers. You can create a database from the ground up, or import your contacts from any of several different existing systems. BatchBook has a great feature, which they call “SuperTagging”, which you can use to create custom fields that’ll let you monitor the information that’s important to you, not just those that conform to the software.

Its social media monitoring helps keep the lines between personal and business contacts on social media channels clear. For each of your contacts, you can see their most recent tweets, blog posts, as well as their LinkedIn profile.

Another cool feature is the ability to track communications. If you want to know the last time one of your team members contacted a client, you can see it in BatchBook, whether it was an email or phone call, you’ll have a complete record of all of your communications with your clients. And with BatchBox, your emails can get forwarded directly to BatchBook and attach them to your contact, so you’ll know exactly where you stand at all times.

BatchBook gives you the ability to collect information about your clients and other business-specific information. Not only does it do that, but it gives you an easy-to-use system with customer support that’s second-to-none.

Got the contact management blues? Get BatchBook.


Cool Apps: Rediscover GOOGLE Apps!

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Yes, yes. I know. Google Apps, the search juggernaut’s super-smart, everything-rolled-into-one-for-a-nifty-little-price business solution, isn’t exactly new.

Not exactly, anyway.

For while Google Apps has been around for a few years, an announcement last week merits your attention – in fact, it merits a good long look!

Google has completely upped its game by expanding Google Apps’ capabilities exponentially. They’ve done this by launching the Google Apps Marketplace.

If you’re at all familiar with the iPhone App Store – the collection of some 200,000 small applications that run on your phone – this news will seem familiar to you.

What this new Marketplace has done is to offer products and services that integrate fully with Google Apps. From accounting and finance tools, like Freshbooks, to image editing, like Aviary, as well as payroll tools, CRM, expense reports, and analytics tools for your websites. For the most part, these tools include single sign-on (so you don’t have to log in again and again and again), as well as Google’s universal navigation.

And you can count on the number of apps in the Marketplace to continue growing as programmers vie to make their latest creations available to the millions of Google Apps users.

In effect, what Google has done is make it possible to run your entire office from any location. Where you are doesn’t really matter.

In order to use the Marketplace, of course, you have to be a Google Apps user. If you’re not, take it out for a spin; you won’t regret it. If you’re already using Google Apps, then good on ya’. Step into the Marketplace and give it a try.

“New” doesn’t always mean “best” … sometimes we just have to look at something seasoned in a new way to find something that’ll change everything.