We’ve really pleased to have just released our referral program after lots of feature requests by our users – we wanted you to be able to share in our success, so all do you need to do to start earning 20% of all paid for plans is login and visit the admin section.
You can sign up for the referral program and start earning straight away. Full details are on the Tactile CRM website, and you can track referrals in real time from your account:
The brief: Tactile CRM’s website is need of an overhaul, and as part of the plan this year we’re measuring and reporting on the the changes we make to see what is and isn’t succussful. We want to increase our conversion ratio on sign ups so we’re currently doing some market research on sites that people have felt comfortable buying from and leaving the credit card details.
The current list includes:
Are there anymore you have brought from, or can suggest?
2009 is going to see a fair few exciting changes and new things for us at omelett.es. One goal is a big push on the number of signups for Tactile CRM
With the new features we have released (and will be), the platform is really great and we know will be of great benefit to people. Part of this push will be some updates and tweaks to the website, which leads on to my main question:
Have you ever brought [business to business] services based on presentation/brand, not just price? If so, who from?
Let me give you an example, I am about to send off a stack of business cards to Cloud Contacts, however I was recommended several other companies, but chose them on their website presentation and look and feel of the business. Hopefully, I won’t regret it, but the decision was certainly based on looks.
This week we are building and launching a new product which we will donate 50% of the first year’s profits to charity. The product is called Spend Meter, and we’re live blogging progress at Operation Canine.
We’ve nominated ourselves for the Crunchies 2008! If you are feeling in a helpful mood, we’d love for you to help us out by nominating Tactile CRM in any, or all of the following categories:
In the current economic situation it is the companies that keep it simple (stupid) and streamline their processes who will be the winners.
When it comes to pricing this couldn’t be more true, and is often an area that is overlooked. At Tactile CRM we’re currently simplifying our pricing structure, to make it easier for current and prospective users to understand our pricing bands. We think this is important from a ‘user acquisition’ point of view (please excuse the buzzwords) as it will help us to sign up more paying users.
However, not everybody has the same reasoning. I recently tried to join the local gym when I moved to Oxford, and nowhere on their website do they display pricing (correct me if I am wrong, but I haven’t found it yet). As a result, Esporta made me give up some of my weekend to visit the gym where I was still not able to find out the costs – two people on reception didn’t know them, and after a 15 minute waiting to see ’someone’ I still hadn’t got any further and left.
I was quite happy to make an appointment to see somebody but nobody seemed that clued up – maybe a simple CRM system like Tactile CRM would have been a help.
Obviously I don’t know their pricing, but I’d imagine they are currently down about £1,200-£1,500 a year as my partner and I are now looking elsewhere. Hopefully my situation will have been a one off, but I have written to the manager out of courtesy to let them know what happened and given them a chance to redeem themselves.
I’m very much a believer that ex-customers are as important as those you currently have, as you can learn from them how to make your product/service better. That’s a blog post for another time though!
British Rail (or whatever they are called these days – National Rail, it turns out) are a great example of how this should work, the recently updated their ticket pricing from lord knows how many down to 3:
Is that too many acronyms for a Tuesday morning? If so, allow me to translate – ‘We’re off to Future of Web Apps thanks to Sun Startup Essentials‘.
We’re part of the excellent Startup Essentials program from Sun designed specifically to help startups get off the ground rapidly and at lower cost. We’ve taken advantage of some of the excellent discounts on hardware, and are going to be looking into to their expertise when it comes to some nifty hardware/software configuration/optimisation too.
We’ve won a stand to exhibit Tactile CRM at FOWA London next week and are now busy planning what to do on the stand. Our neighbouring stand, Fav.or.it have an awesome Lego Death Star to build, and I am hearing rumours of some beach and hawian shirt action from Stewart at Sun. So what do we have?
We’re still planning at the moment, but needless to say Denver the Tactile CRM dragon will be making a reappearance, we’ll have some beer, a demo of Tactile CRM, and more. So watch this space!
Coventry based Tactile CRM are helping to bring the traditional Harvest Festival into the 21st Century by sponsoring this week’s brand new ‘Harvest Twestival‘.
‘Harvest Twestival’ is collecting food and money for The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields, to help the homeless. Following the tradtional Harvest Festival format of collecting tins of food, it’s being brought into the 21st century by being organised via the social networking site Twitter to bring together people from all over the country to help support this worthy cause.
Jake Stride – Managing Director, said “We’re really pleased to be involved in the World’s first ever Harvest Twestival and hope more people are able to leverage the Internet, and the friends they make online to try and make a difference to those less fortunate than themselves.”.
On Thursday 25 September, over 200 people who know each other through Twitter.com will descend on Doon, an exclusive venue in Trafalgar Square, for Harvest Twestival, a tweet-up with a social conscience.
The event will bring together fun people, fresh ideas and a few surprises for what promises to be an unforgettable event. All profits from the night will be donated to The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields, a community centre based in Trafalgar Square that works with homeless people.
Amanda Rose, one of the organisers of Harvest Twestival, said “We’re expecting the who’s who of the UK Twitter scene to attend. Social tweet ups like this are a great way to meet the faces behind those avatars while raising lots of money for a fantastic cause.”
The event is sponsored by UnLtd World, Huddle, Diffusion PR, Tactile CRM, Winston & Strawn LLP and Just Giving.
To find out more about Harvest Twestival, go to the official event website at www.twestival.com or follow @harvesttwest on Twitter. For more information on The Connection at St-Martins-In-The-Fields, go to www.connection-at-stmartins.org.uk.
I sign up to, trial and test a higher than usual number of products on the web. Most are easy signups and not too onerous.
We’ve taken this to heart with our Tactile CRM product. You can sign up for the product for free, no credit card details required, and it’s free for as long as you like.
Here are the details we ask for if you sign up for the free version of Tactile CRM:
OK, it’s not the shortest sign up, but we need all those details to set up a new account – it’s not us trying to do data capture. The main point is we don’t ask for your card details on the free trial.
We want people to start using Tactile CRM, try the product and give us feedback.
As a start-up this feedback and exposure is just as important as the people that sign up for the paying plans. We really do want people to use the product and actively pursue feedback and suggestions we receive, so giving users an extra barrier to entry, such as entering credit card details is a no-no.
So sign up forms like the following from Apple’s Mobile Me is silly in my opinion:
I wanted to give the Mobile Me ‘Exchange for the rest of us’ feature a try with my email (I already have IMAP and wanted to see if it improved on it).
The old .mac service let you have a free trial without this step and I gave it a go. However, I can’t be bothered to complete the above form as I am likely to forget to cancel the trial if I don’t want to carry on.
I’m sure Apple aren’t worried about little old Jake not signing up, but for some of the smaller fish like ourselves we want as many people as we can get.
I’m not an angry man and it takes a lot to irritate me, but O2 have managed it today.
Rewind a few weeks to the announcement by Apple that the 3G iPhone is being launched on the 11th July. I patiently waited for O2 to update their website, and registered to be kept updated (nothing has been emailed to me as of the 1st July). In the meantime I happened to be passing by my local O2 store after finding out other stores were pre-credit checking for the iPhone launch.
First bit of rubbish customer service by O2. It was a lunch time and there were four customers in the Coventy store. Two members of staff were on duty with a third on their lunch break. If I was running a retail store I’d schedule shifts so that staff lunches were not over the main lunch period of 12-2pm. That’s what happened when I worked at Waitrose.
So after a wait of 20 minutes I finally spoke to a lady and explained that I wanted to open a new business account for the iPhone with four handsets, pre-credit check so that I didn’t have to hand around on the launch date and what would I need to do:
Sorry sir, you can’t do that
Now I know that is not true, and explained that other people had been able to do it. She begrudginly walked off to ‘ask her manager’ who was hiding out the back of the store and not dealing with customers when it was busy.
She returned, said ‘oh yeah we can, you’ll have to come back on the 1st of July’. I asked her what I would need and she told me the various bits of paperwork I would need.
Fast forward to today. I rang the O2 store in Coventry, asked if I could come in and pre-credit check for a business account, and double checked the paperwork I would need. The man I spoke to on the phone confirmed the paperwork and said I could come in today and do it. I double checked this would be OK for the business account and was assured this was the case.
An hour later I arrived at the store. Same story – busy at lunch with a long queue. I had anticipated this and needed to do some banking. I did this, came back half an hour later and the queue had gone.
I explained to the man what I wanted to do, he sat me down and began the process.
Next mistake he tried to credit check me as a personal user.
The man then had to ring his manager (who was off), couldn’t get through, rang the Birmingham branch, the person wasn’t available and waited for a call back. 30 minutes later after lots of waiting and trying different numbers he finally spoke to another colleague who dis-interestingly said it wasn’t possible.
The young man explained that they had been told about the pre-credit/iPhone process yesterday and that they hadn’t received all the relevent training.
At this point I have wasted a good 2 hours of time, got fairly frustrated and feel like 02 don’t want the £4,000 they are going to make from me.
I find it hard to beleive that the second time round O2 are still disorganised, don’t have a process in place for the iPhone sale and generally can’t be bothered to take my money or make their (and my) life a bit easier by doing things in advanced.
Right now I’m feeling like a really can’t be bother switching to O2 and the iPhone isn’t really worth all the hassle. I have been chasing O2, wasted my time, put up with rude staff and had to deal with a lack of competence and training.
If I could get the iPhone on another network I certain would (Orange’s customer service was fantastic when I was with them), at the moment it’s doubtful I will get one at all. Right now, O2 your organisation and customer service is awful.