A big score for Vodafone and Twitter to have UK SMS back again. I wonder how many Twitter users will switch to Vodafone. It’s a great feature – we have Twitter integration with Resolve RM and being able to receive SMS updates for free when a customer sends in a request is useful. If you use Resolve RM and Vodafone the feature is back again!
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.
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!
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:
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™
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!
We’ve just found out that one of our core suppliers in our data centre is having to do so fibre moves this Sunday. The maintenance window will be 9AM-5PM (GMT) and service will be unavailable for a short period during that time – not the whole of that time – we will update the downtime period when we are given further details tomorrow.
To keep you informed as to when things will be unavailable we’ve setup a new status page where we will let you know exactly what is happening.
We are really sorry for the inconvience and are taking steps to ensure that this doesn’t happen again at such short notice. We appreciate your understanding in this matter, if you have any questions at all, please drop us an email to support [at] tactilecrm dot com.
Many Thanks
Team Tactile CRM
Wow, it’s been hectic here since we last updated our semi-regular list of interesting things we found on the web! I’ve been preparing for the trip to SXSW, we’ve updated the FreshBooks integration with Tactile CRM, released Resolve RM (into beta), added some more updates to the sales graphs, and a whole lot more we’ll tell you about in the next few weeks! I feel tired just writing about it. Whilst we’ve been working on all of this, we’ve found a few useful resources on the web you might find interesting. For your viewing/reading pleasure:
As always, we’d love to hear ideas and suggestions from you – just drop us an email to links [at] omelett.es with any interesting stuff and we’ll take a look.
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.
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
You spoke and we listened! It was often requested that being able to see pipelines and sales reports for all users in an organisation would be useful; so today I’m pleased to announce that if you login to your account (as an admin)* you will now be able to see the full range of graphs and now choose to view them for each user, all users, or all active users.
This should make it easier to see how individual members of staff are performing as well as seeing how the whole organisation is performing against targets.
* per user and cross organisation reporting is only available on paid plans.
We use Campaign Monitor to send out our ‘monthly’ Tactile CRM newsletter. After reading a recent article on their blog about how they redesigned their newsletter I thought I’d apply some of the principles to ours and see what a difference it made.
The changes made a massive effect (in a good way). Using their ideas/suggestions we doubled the click through rate on our emails (consequently we saw a big spike in traffic to the website/blog) and increased our open rate by 50%.
All of this took about half an hour – we already had the content, and used the campaign monitor templates with a few tweaks of our own. Now that we know it works we’ll spend a bit more time with our own design and look and feel but all in all it was time well spent.
The main changes we made were:
This last point is quite important. If you look at the new newsletter below, it looks more like a newsletter than an email with a lot of text (like the original) – I still wanted to include a personal greeting at the top but I think the blend works well and the results speak for themsleves.
