Batchbook blogs about me!

So I have been using this web app called Batchbook CRM for almost two months now. They let you sort and tag all your contacts with a ton of great features that make keeping on top of your networking so much easier. I won’t go into all the details of how it works here, but one of the things that was holding me back from completely loving it was that they don’t let you send an email from directly within the app. They have ‘mailto’ links that open your email application. The problem for me is that I use gmail so I would have to go to a new window and just copy and paste addresses. It may not sound like a big deal, but it slowed things down enough that it was really making their whole system (slightly) less appealing.

The other day I was messing around with Greasemonkey, an add-on for Firefox that allows you to add your own scripts to websites. I am a sucker for stuff like this and wanted to try out a few of the scripts that make Gmail more functional, including one that added a little sidebar for Toodledo (another of my favorites – a great todo list app). In the midst off all that I noticed one that could turn all the email links you came across in your browser into links that would open in Gmail instead of on your desktop with say Outlook or Entourage.

So that got me thinking… If they can do it, why isn’t Batchbook doing this? I went onto the forums at Batchbook and suggested that maybe they could add an option where Gmail users could get their mailto links to be coded so that they open straight into Gmail. I thought for sure that I was missing something and would maybe never get this request. Even if it was a good idea, it must be hard to add something into the code across an entire site like that, right? But by the next time I logged in, they had done it and activated it across their entire service! It is now an option right in the user’s account settings. It turned out they had been struggling to find the exact way to pass the info in the URL and one of these scripts I had found did it, right. It was as easy as it had looked after all.

This has been just one example of how this company offers some of the best customer service I have seen. They are very active in the support forums and acted on my little suggestion before I even had time to log in again. And on top of all of that, they wrote a blog post to thank me and a couple other users for their help in masking it happen!

Check out Batchbook CRM if you are at all interested in staying on top of all the emails and phone calls that you are always forgetting to make. This isn’t an all around CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution but more of a networking manager. They have a free account (for up to 200 contacts, I think) and for 10/month, it really does a lot. They have tutorial videos on the site that will explain what they do better than I can here. But make sure you look into their ‘Supertag’ system.