the Senokian blog - things that interest us: design, software, business and the odd random musing. Check out our products (below right) or visit the Senokian site.
After the success of the first Coventry Open Coffee Club, I have finally got round to organising the second one.
It’s going to be on 5th June 2008 at 6pm. Full details are on Upcoming, please feel free to invite anybody you think might be interested. This isn’t intended to be a boring business networking event, rather an opportunity for like minded people to meet up and chat.
As mentioned at Thinking Digital, here is the first pass at BuzzWord Bingo for the conference.
I’m at Thinking Digital in Newcastle this week. Went to a great presentation yesterday by Tara Hunt, slides are below, and met some great people, including one of my university lecturers Lindsay Marshall.
It kicks off properly today so I’ll write some more about it this evening, in the meantime I wanted to post a couple of links to a blog I read about Dashboard Design we were discussing last night:
Normally I hate phoning large companies and getting put through their phone systems. T-Mobile is an ideal example of this - everytime I call them they make me listen to their menu options, push 3 or 4 numbers and then I get put straight through to the business team who have no idea which buttons I have pressed.
Today was different though. I called Black Horse for the first time, they asked me 3 simple questions which I answered by voice instead of key presses. It got every single one right first time even in the car, on the motorway, and on handsfree. Once I had done that a nice lady answered the phone - ‘Hi Mr Stride’, I was taken back at first but I assume from my date of birth and phone number they were able to verify who I was.
The rest of the converstation was very much in taken in awe at how well the IVR had worked and that they knew who I was before I even spoke to a person.
Well done Black Horse, an excellent example of using technology just the right amount, not losing the personal touch, and not irritating your customers.
I saw this on Twitter last night from one of my friends and it had me laughing all the way through - quite childish I know but I thought it might bring a smile to a few people’s faces!
I’m not quite sure it is what Sir Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he invented the World WIde Web but you never know!
It amazes me just how many people fail in the sales process at the first stage. Let me give you an example:
Last week I was ringing around trying to get further details about some property to let in the area. I had to ring 3 times before ‘the person I needed to talk to’ was in the office. However, before I managed to get through the lady answering the phone never once bothered to take my details or get somebody to call me back.
In this situation I was motivated enough to call back and be persitent; there are numerous other occassions when this had not been so and a potential company has lost out on a sale simple becuase they didn’t know who I was.
Using an CRM package (such as Tactile CRM) can obviously help with this, but a large part is down to the education of staff and having a process in place to deal with things like this.
We get quite a few emails about why the blog is called barking so I thought I’d right write a quick post as to why.
As many of you will know, Archie is our office dog and he comes in every day to keep everyone company. Technically he is ‘Head of Morale and Security’ although he would soon sooner lick you to death than get aggressive!
Unfortunately the story is no more interesting than we needed a name for the blog and thought barking seemed like a good a name as any - we did think it would be nice to name it after Archie but thought that didn’t fit quite as well as barking - so there you are.
You never know, we may one day get a guest post from him; the best you will get for the moment though is some pictures of him enjoying himself on a recent trip to Cornwall.
We are pleased to announce the second of two new feature sets we have recently rolled out to Tactile CRM.
These features are based around activities and calendaring.
Activities in Tactile have been upgraded - previously they were simply a list of ‘To Do’ type items that you could attach against clients, leads, people and opportunities. There was a bit more to them than that, you got an email when people added new ones for you, a daily update when you had things to do, but now we have made them even better (don’t worry all the old stuff is still there too)!
Events - the first change we have made to activities is to add the concept of an event. This could be a meeting, a lunch or anything that would typically block out a period of time in your diary for.
You can of course still add ‘To Do’ items, but now you can add events too.
iCal/vCal - Tactile CRM is designed to be an easy to use CRM system for small businesses. We have deliberately kept away from building a calendar application as there are several excellent ones already available (Google Calendar and iCal), what we have now added is two easy ways to add events to your favourite calendar application.
The first is an iCal/vCal feed you can subscribe to and keep your calendar application synced with Tactile CRM:
All you need to do is visit your preferences (generate the link if you haven’t already) and you can subscribe to the link in your favourite calendar application and keep updated with all the information in Tactile CRM.
If you want to share an individual event with somebody, or just download it for reference, you can easily do that too. We’ve added a handy link when you view an activity:
The Tactile CRM Help has been updated with full details on how to use iCal/vCal information.
Finally we have also added a date picker. When you need to add a date anywhere within Tactile CRM, simple click on the date field and the handy date picker will pop up to allow you to easily choose a date:
Remember - if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback you would like to give us we’d love to hear them. Just drop us an email to support@tactilecrm.com and tell us anything you want so we can right any wrongs. We read every bit of feedback we can get our hands on, and try to rectify the things we can.
We are pleased to announce the first of two new feature sets we recently pushed out to Tactile CRM.
These features are based around the way we deal with contacts, particularly people within Tactile CRM.
Permissions on people - the way permissions used to work on people wasn’t great. If you created a person that didn’t belong to a client/lead then only you could see it. For freelancers and B2C businesses this wasn’t great as it meant you couldn’t share these contacts easily with other people in your organisation.
After comments and feedback from users we updated people so that when you add new ones everyone can see them unless you mark them as private:
We’ve updated the permissions help on the website accordingly.
Email linking - when you logged in and looked at your dashboard you could see all the recent emails that had been sent. Great, apart from the fact that you had to search for the person to find them and see what else was going on. We’ve fixed this by making the person a clickable link through to their record so you can now easily find them:
Remember - if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback you would like to give us we’d love to hear them. Just drop us an email to support@tactilecrm.com and tell us anything you want so we can right any wrongs. We read every bit of feedback we can get our hands on, and try to rectify the things we can.
Had a great afternoon at the TechCrunch UK meetup yesterday, spoke to a lot of cool people and got a few people interested in Tactile CRM.
Blagged some swag, a couple of t-shirts, a bag and a frisbee too, and managed to snap Mike Butcher with one of our dragons on his head!
I had an interesting conversation with a few guys about usability and managed to get some good tips about Corsica for my trip in July! A few cheeky beers were had throughout the afternoon and everyone was really friendly.
Well done to Mike for organising the event and I look forward to the next one.
