So I have gone the whole day using windows – most of my time today has been in IE and I’ve found a few visual tweaks to Tactile CRM that are being taken care of. All in all it was a lot less painful than I expected – main points are:
I’m challenging myself as a mac user to run Windows for a week. I’ve got a fresh install of Vista on my iMac and I’m going to document how it goes.
The main reason for this is research for our Tactile CRM product – we develop on Macs and Linux in the office and test in Windows but we don’t really use the product in anger on windows. From a personal perspective I haven’t used Windows for about 10 years so I’m interested to see how it compares to OS X.
Windows for a Week from Jake Stride on Vimeo.
A bit of background: Companies House is the UK government organisation responsible for maintaining and updating company information, their main functions are to:
Companies House are also the only website I have ever come across with opening hours – you can only use their online services between Monday to Sunday 07:00 – 12 Midnight UK Time.
I’m about to go away for 2 weeks and wanted to get a company returned file, every year I have issues filing online as I use firefox on a Mac – surprisingly, this year was less painful than others.
There isn’t a huge amount of information to fill out as it is all pre-filled, but with an address change it’s 5 or 6 screens worth of information to check and one to update – takes about 5 minutes.
After finally finding all the relevent paperwork to actually log in to the system I filled out my return with no problems (this part of the system works pretty well – took 5 minutes).
My first issue came when submitting the completed return to Companies House – I got a blank screen. Several refreshes later still no luck, so I call Companies House. After several calls and being given different numbers I finally find somebody who can help me out (10 minutes). It turns out that when you fill out your contact details at the end of the process, if you put your email address AND your mobile number it won’t work – bizarrely it doesn’t tell you this.
At this point I can’t go back so I have to complete the return again (another 5 minutes). This time I know the trick to submit and get a reference (called an envelope code on their system), so I now get the privelege of having to pay £15 to send them the information. Great.
At this point I am shipped out to the diabolical NetBanx system to pay. After completing my card details I get an error saying the card details were wrong (they weren’t), so I clicked the link provided to update them. This took me to another error page saying my email address was invalid (it wasn’t, and it didn’t flag it up the first time either), so I click the link to go back and update the details as it tells me. This takes me back to the error page saying my card details were wrong (I haven’t had a chance to change them yet).
After a few clicks it’s another call to Companies House, the lady kindly tells me they don’t (and have never taken card payments by phone), I correct her and tell her I have had to do this several times before in previous years. I use one of the other numbers, get told the correct one, the lady kindly tells me she will get somebody to ring me back (another 10 minutes wasted).
About an hour later a very nice lady calls and takes my card details and the return is filed.
Total cost: £15 and over half an hour.
It was only due to me persistence that this got done, I don’t why it is so difficult.
Photo Credit: Zach Klein
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!
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.
I don’t often ‘Google‘ for our own software product, but since launching the new site I’ve been checking a few pages to see how we are doing – imagine my surprise when I found a competitor ‘passing off’ as us for our own name!
(Yes there is a free trial of Tactile CRM, you can sign up on our site for it.)
Imitation is supposed to be the highest form of flattery and I realise that competitor’s products will appear in search results and as adwords on Google for general terms, but when the ad text misleads people into thinking that they are clicking through to our product I think it’s a bit below the line.
With phrases such as ‘Free Tactile CRM Trial’ and ‘Tactile CRM has never been better’ (that last one is technically true – the new release is awesome and we’ve had loads of positive feedback) I believe the ads are wrong and misleading.
Check out a couple of the other offending ads below:
That’s right, Tactile CRM has never been better – check out the new version on our site.
Of course Tactile CRM integrates with Outlook, infact if you check out our site you’ll see how Tactile CRM integrates with all email clients!
If you feel inclined, and want to up their adwords bill, feel free to visit the Google page and click on their advert! If you want the real Tactile CRM though visit our website.
A big thanks to Steve Tuck, he had a similar problem and pointed me in the right direction for the Google Trademark complaint procedure (as did James Burke).
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.
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 video was created using iMovie, IShowU and a logitech microphone (actually my old PS2 one from SOCOM).
Things I found making the video:
iMovie was fairly easy to pick up, the main thing that held me up was stuttering play back and audio. I found that removing the transitions until all the audio was recorded resolved this problem, but it had me stuck for about an hour!
All in all I’d say it took 3-4 hours to produce a 60 second clip. I don’t expect it to take this long in the future – most of this time was spent getting used to the software.
It’s not as star studded and glamorous as the BAFTAs or Oscars, and it’s my first time making a video, so please be gentle – for your veiwing pleasure, Tactile CRM – an introduction:
Tactile CRM: an Introduction from Jake Stride on Vimeo.