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 got to use Chrome for the first time!
• Windows doesn’t come with SSH client, PDF viewer or messenger app
• I can’t rotate my screen in Windows like I can on a mac (identical hardware)

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:

• incorporate and dissolve limited companies;
• examine and store company information delivered under the Companies Act and related legislation; and
• make this information available to the public.

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.

The Issues

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.

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!

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™

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.