Product Blog

Archive for the ‘Bits and Bobs’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Introducing visual cues in Tactile CRM

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Visual cues is the fancy name for a new feature we have just added to Tactile CRM to allow users to upload logos/pictures against people and organisations within the system.

Overview of the new people page

We’ve been wanting to add this for some time and have been playing around with a few different ways of doing it – the reason is simple, research shows that scanning a list/series of images is a far quicker way of finding information and that the brain is better at processing these visual clues.

As Tactile CRM is designed to make your day to day business life easier to manage we thought this would be a great way to help save some time.

The process is easy. Simple view an organisation or person, click on the icon to the left of their name and an upload box will appear:

Image Upload Dialog

The image will be automatically resized and stored against them (this works the same for logos and pictures against organisations and people). The images will then be displayed when you view them on the overview pages:

People Overview

and when you view each item:

View of a person with a picture

We hope you find this new feature useful – it’s part of some larger UI updates we have been doing – and has been lead by user feedback and suggestions, so if you want to see something in Tactile CRM, just share your ideas on our feedback forum.

Support, made simple

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Our goal is to make Tactile CRM the best easy to use web based crm system for small businesses. As part of this drive we recently made email support available for free to all users (not just paying customers), now we’ve made it easy to submit a support request directly when using Tactile CRM:

Built in Support

Got a question or need help with Tactile CRM? Click the Support link (top right) and a window will open within the sytem (prefilled with your email address so we can get back to you). All you need to do is tell us what’s up and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

We hope this makes life easier for people, and encourages people to ask us questions to get the most from Tactile CRM.

New Account Area for Tactile CRM

Friday, April 17th, 2009

We’re pleased to announce a new feature we rolled out last week to Tactile CRM to allow admin users to update your contact details:

Screenshot

It’s a small thing that can make a big difference – you can correct any email mistakes (incase you weren’t getting emails from us correctly) and update where you are in the World – it’s nice for us to know where you are from, but from a more practical stand point, if we look at localisation we’ll use this setting too.

Remember, we always take feedback seriously and it influences our roadmap for Tactile CRM, if you have any ideas, feedback or suggestions do let us know!

Why support shouldn’t be second class for free accounts

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

The news: from the 31st March 2009 we’re going to give email support to all Tactile CRM users including the free plans – no more messing around on the fourms (unless you want to!).

We’ve got several reasons and I’ll outline them below. However, the main reason is we’re here to make some money. That’s a bold statement, so please bear with me (you might want to check out Alistair at Huddle’s post on why sales shouldn’t be a dirty word to see that I’m not alone/crazy).

We know CRM, we’ve built custom systems for the NHS (UK health service) and companies large and small over the years. As a result we built Tactile CRM to be easy to use and to help businesses get organised and win more business. It would be a poor show if we didn’t want to do the same – so at the end of the day we built Tactile CRM to make us some money and have fun doing it.

Why give email support for free?

When we launched Tactile CRM one of our differentiators was full email support on paid plans and forum only support for free pans. We’ve realised this was the wrong way round and are now going to fix the problem in one swift go!

For us an active free user is much more valuable and likely to upgrade to a paid plan than one who logs in once and leaves, so helping them out when they are starting is a no brainer.

Making them visit a forum and wait for an answer is a sure fire way to lose them. We want people to get in touch and ask us questions – emailing support@tactilecrm.com is just one way, sign up for a free account to see some of the other things we do to help you out (including our free webinars)!

So no more frustration when you can’t get your questions answered on the forums!

Frustration at Tech Support

But wait, there’s more

Helping people start using your system is a sure fire way to help hook them in and convert more sales – I believe everyone should be doing this – it’s a no brainer and I wish we’d done it sooner.

From an operations perspective it has some other benefits too:

  1. We now have one place to deal with support – checking the forum for support issues was a pain (we still do it as it’s useful to have the community there for people that want to discuss things above and beyond support) – this makes it a lot easier and timely for responses
  2. We’ve recently put Resolve RM (our support/case management system) into beta and wanted to give it a bit more of a test internally so more emails is better!
  3. Email is a more obvious workflow/place for people to submit and deal with support – everyone (who uses Tactile CRM) uses email, only a small percentage use forums

Most of the above are internal benefits, but I really do believe everyone should be giving as much help/support to get people using their software as possible, not making it even more difficult when they are in the decision making stage.

Photo Credit: √oхέƒx™

Tactile CRM at SXSW

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Check out the video interview I did at SXSW this year with the CenterNetworks team, not sure why I always look tired – I can assure you I wasn’t when this was taken!

Catch up with us at SXSWi

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

This week I’m heading off to the SXSWi conference as part of a group of 35 of the UK’s leading SMEs from the digital industry.

I’ll be in Austin, Texas on the Digital Mission from 12-18 March 2009 so if you would like to catch up with me to discuss Tactile CRM, Spend Meter, or our latest product Resolve RM (or anything else for that matter!), drop me an email to jake [at] omelett dot es and I’ll sort something out.

austin

It’s part of a UKTI trade mission and is designed to help UK companies better equip themselves for business in the States (I have already been on one previously to NYC that was incredible useful and we’re delighted to have been accepted on the second of these this year).

Photo Credit: Eschipul

Tactile CRM + FreshBooks

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Great news – we’re pleased to announce the new integration of FreshBooks with Tactile CRM has just got even better. All you need to do is enter your FreshBooks API key and you’ll be on your way to viewing customer invoices directly in Tactile CRM and sending new customer details to FreshBooks when you win new deals.

To make it even easier we’ve put together a quick video (about 3 and a half minutes), showing how easy it is to setup and use:

So, the details in full – from Tactile CRM you can now:

  • Import FreshBooks clients
  • View Invoices for your clients
  • Automatic syncronisation of invoices
  • Add organisations and people directly to FreshBooks without leaving Tactile CRM

But that’s not all! The nice folks over the pond at FreshBooks have given us the handy promotional code ‘tactile09′ which you can use to get $20 off your FreshBooks account.

Keep it handy and when you decide to upgrade your account with them just enter it in the promotional code box. Don’t delay though, it expires on the 1 October 2009 and it will probably come around faster than you think!

This is our first stage integration with FreshBooks. There are some other things we’re going to add, somethings we’d like to add when they update their API, and somethings we’d love for you to suggest! Just drop on by our feedback forums and tell us what we can do to improve [FreshBooks +] Tactile CRM and we’ll get straight on it.

Tactile CRM selected for Web Mission 2009

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

I’m really please to announce that Tactile CRM has been selected to represent UK web innovation abroad on the UKTI sponsored Web Mission.

We will be spending an intensive week in San Francisco networking, arranging meetings and attending the expo. If you’d like to meet up whilst we’re there get in touch and we’ll try and fit something in!

I’ll be in San Fransisco from 28 March to 3 April 2009 so if you would like to catch up with me to discuss Tactile CRM, Spend Meter, or our latest product Resolve RM (or anything else for that matter!), drop me an email to jake [at] omelett dot es and I’ll sort something out.

San Fransisco

It’s part of a UKTI trade mission and is designed to help UK companies focusing on enterprise applications better equip themselves for business in the States (I have already been on one previously to NYC that was incredible useful and I’m off to SXSW too) we’re delighted to have been accepted on the Web Mission and we hope you’ll see the benefits of it in the coming months.

Photo Credit: Benjamin Rossen.

The New Tactile CRM Website

Friday, February 20th, 2009

If you’ve visited the Tactile CRM website recently (and it wasn’t your first visit), you will have noticed that it looked a little different! We’ve taken the opportunity to give it a refresh alongside the new version of Tactile CRM that we have just released.

New Tactile CRM Website

The old site was looking tired and it didn’t reflect what Tactile CRM could do. We’ve got a load of new testimonials (drop me an email to jake [at] tactilecrm dot com if you are interested in being included), new video content and hopefully an all round better site.

That’s not the end though, we’re going to be making some tweaks and changes over the coming months using what is known as A/B split testing (we try making small changes, record the difference in signups and make a decision based on that – if you want a really dull in-depth explanation, check out wikipedia) to see how we can increase the sign up and conversion rates to make sure even more people benefit from Tactile CRM.

As always, your comments thoughts, feedback and suggestions are gratefully received.

Paid plans now have more – unlimited opportunities!

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

It’s simple really – just like Tactile CRM – use one of our Business, Premier or Enterprise plans and we’re now including unlimited opportunities!

Pile of Money

This is not a one time offer or something we’re going to change – we see opportunities as being a key feature in Tactile CRM, after all they are what makes your organisation money.

It’s really easy to take advantage of this upgrade – if you are already on a Business, Premier, or Enterprise plan you don’t need to do anything, we’ve already made the changes to your account. If you’re not, sign up or change your account in the admin area of Tactile CRM and the changes will be applied straight away.

Photo Credit: Unhindered by Talent

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »