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.

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