Posted by Bob Walton on Sun, Dec 27, 2009 @ 12:07 PM
Before investing in Contact Management Software or Small Business CRM, you need to have all the facts. Most systems today come full of "bells and whistles" that are touted as essential to helping you in your business.
The reality is that many of these features may rarely get used if at all. On the other hand there may be certain features that are critical to your business. This investment requires a methodical approach to ensure that you make the right choice. Don't make your decision based solely on price or on features.
Consider what's important to you before making a quick decision.
- What are the minimum requirements for you business today?
- What are your growth plans and will this system allow you to grow without a significant $ investment?
- Is it easy-to-use; allowing you to get off to a quick start with all of your employees using it?
If you experience any trouble viewing this example of research, Click Here for a full size image of these tables. 
If you would like a comparison to any other Small Business CRM or Contact Management Software, Contact Us at 1-888-286-6578. We will do the detailed research and provide you with an objective and detailed report.
Posted by Bob Walton on Fri, Sep 18, 2009 @ 09:01 AM
One our primary goals as a software service provider is deliver a very intuitive, easy-to-use application for our subscribers. One way we accomplish this is through the concept of our "Contact Dashboard" .
We are one of the few Contact Management (CRM) companies that presents all of your contact history in a very organized manner on a single screen. Putting all of this information on a single screen makes it that much easier to manage your client and prospect relationships as you have everything you need at your fingertips.
Having said that, we realize that all of this information on a single screen can create limitations in other areas. You have told us that you would like a larger, more detailed view of the calendar. The calendar view has been limited to a width of about one-third of the right hand side of your screen. This was done in order to accommodate all the other information we are presenting to you on this dashboard.
We are at the very beginning stages of designing/developing our next generation platform - "Big Contacts 2.0". In the process of this development, we will begin to present you with new and improved designs within the system. This Friday we will release a few small, but helpful enhancements to the calendar.
Expandable Calendar View
From the Contact Dashboard, you will click to expand the calendar folder as you have always done, but you will now notice a new link in the upper left hand corner called (full screen calendar). This link will allow you to expand the calendar to a full screen view.
One of the biggest benefits to this expanded view is that you will now be able to see details of your meetings and your team members' meetings when in the "31" of "31 Group" views.
After you are finished working in your calendar, simply click on the same link in the upper left hand corner (restore calendar) and you are now back to the normal dashboard view to continue working on your clients and prospects.
Meeting Reminders
Another requested enhancement to our calendar is meeting reminders. With this release you will now have meeting reminders available to you.
Each user on the system will determine whether or not they want the meeting reminder activated - based on how they personally prefer to handle their meetings. The user will determine three things in their setup:
* Do they want the meeting reminder feature on or off?
* How far in advance do they wish to have the system begin reminding them?
* Do they want the reminders to repeat?
(The system can be set to as little as 5 minutes to as long as 120 minutes in advance.)
After these settings are determined, the calendar will "default" to this configuration for every meeting that is scheduled, UNLESS you choose otherwise. When scheduling a meeting you will have the option to adjust any of these three settings.
For example, you may NOT want a reminder for certain meetings. Or you may want to be reminded further in advance for one meeting or another. And finally, you may not want to get a repeating reminder for a certain meeting.
(Please note: repeating reminders can be stopped at any time by clicking on "dismiss" in the upper right hand corner of the reminder itself.)
PLEASE NOTE: As we design the 2.0 platform, we want your continued feedback. On the "Contacts" tab in the left hand column under the tools section, we have a "Send Feedback" link. We need constructive insights from subscribers like yourself in order to make this the best Contact Management (CRM) platform in the industry! Please send your suggestions and ideas and we will work hard to implement ideas all that appear to add value to our broader subscriber base.
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Stay tuned for more great things to come!
Posted by Bob Walton on Mon, Aug 11, 2008 @ 10:34 AM
The CRM industry has historically been focused on managing customer data. But how can we better use these systems to focus on our clients in an effort to generate more profit and growth? We must further leverage the technology to manage our customer/ business processes. Doing so will allow you to deliver a consistent and reliable experience to your clients. This client experience often is the only real way to differentiate yourself in a very competitive market.
There is a growing movement in the CRM industry focused on the concept of Business Process Management
The Wikipedia definition of a Business Process reads like this:
A business process is a collection of related, structured activities that produce a service or product that meet the needs of a client. These processes are critical to any organization as they generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs.
Big Contacts has addressed this need and delivers two easy-to-use process management functions.
- Sales Force Automation (SFA) - The "Autopilot" module of our system can literally put most of the activities in your sales cycle on autopilot. With the click of a few buttons you can quickly and easily define multiple tasks that will automatically trigger as a prospect or client moves through each stage your sales pipeline. You may want to generate an email to thank someone for a meeting. Maybe you want your assistant to send a personalized letter and you want to ensure that you are reminded to make a follow up call a few days later. You can create automated functions that will be performed without fail and stored within the contacts record to ensure a complete history of activity. All of this is managed from a single dashboard within the system.
- Client Relationship Management (CRM) - Within every business there is certain set of tasks that must be carried out on an on-going basis to ensure that your business operates smoothly and that you have satisfied clients. The challenge is to effectively manage all of these tasks and to monitor them to ensure they get done correctly and in a timely fashion. Our system allows you to easily create a library of all the tasks that are performed within your company. Most tasks involve multiple steps and often times can involve multiple people within your organization. You simply create a task, designate all the steps involved within the task, and assign each step to the correct person within your organization. It doesn't matter whether each step within the task needs to worked on at the same time by multiple people of whether each step must be completed by a person and then handed off to the person responsible for the next step within that task, the system will reliably coordinate and hand off tasks as you have designed them to work.
Finally, you can establish service standards by defining the time each task and each step within that task should take to complete. The reporting capabilities within our system allow you to monitor all activity and determine where things may be breaking down and where the service standards within your company are not being met.
For more information on how these very powerful modules can work for you in your business, you can visit us at Big Contacts and click on "view a fully populated demo" on the home page or feel free to call us at 1-888-286-6578 Ext. 701
Posted by Bob Walton on Sun, Dec 16, 2007 @ 08:35 AM
BigContacts is a powerful application. And yet, it is designed to be simple to learn and use. Kathy Sierra writes about the problem of Featuritis in her blog Creating Passionate Users. There is a point at which an application becomes difficult to use and starts to frustrate users. Here is the graph Kathy uses to perfectly illustrate the point:
I think that software can be complex and still easy to use. To achieve that, we focus on a few things. One, don't require users to have to remember anything. Instead of cute icons to represent some feature, just spell it out. Our 'Actions' section is just a list of things you can do. It would take less space and might look better to replace that list with a set of icons, but then you'd have to remember what each of those icons does. Another thing we do is to put most everything right in front of you. You don't have to go searching for something. If you want to add a photo, just click on the 'Add a Photo' link right on the page. No need to remember where that feature is. Another thing you will find in BigContacts is that there are no modes. There are no buttons that change meaning depending on what mode you are in. Other contact managers have a 'view' mode and an 'edit' mode and you have to not only remember which mode you are in, but what buttons and links do when you are in each mode.
The hard part of picking up a new software tool is learning and then retaining all that useless knowledge about modes and where things are hidden and what all those icons mean. It is very frustrating and makes you feel stupid and nobody wants that.
With BigContacts there is no user manual. Because once you create a user manual, you are admitting your application is too difficult and that people need a book to use it. We will do our best to never have to resort to that.
Posted by Bob Walton on Wed, Nov 14, 2007 @ 05:01 PM
Introducing the BigContacts Email Dropbox
Did you know you can see all of your email traffic with a contact, even if you don't use Big Contacts to send email? Simply configure your email client to auto-bcc and auto-forward your email to your BigContacts email dropbox. Let's say you have a few emails back and forth with a supplier about a new ship date. All this email back-and-forth takes place in Outlook. As long as you have a contact with that email address, it will be saved for you. Log into BigContacts, pull up the contact and you can see all of the emails! Any email attachments are saved in the files table, for easy download any time you need to find it. No more searching through your inbox looking for an attachment.
Go to the Admin tab and the Users section. Click on 'request a email dropbox' next to a user's name and a dropbox will be created. Call us for detailed instructions for configuring your specific email client.
Posted by Bob Walton on Fri, Apr 27, 2007 @ 08:12 AM
This week we released BigContacts Contact Table. With the contacts table view, you can edit a group of contacts, delete multiple contacts, or merge several contacts into one. You can also assign a task to several contacts at the same time. This is not something you will use all of the time, but is a great way to maintain your contact data.
Update: We now have a flash video you can watch to demonstrate how the Contact Table works. Click here to see the demo
We get asked all the time how to handle duplicates. Let's say you have three identical John Smith contacts. Pull up the contact table, type Smith into the last name filter and John into the first name filter. You will then see all the contacts named John Smith. Click the checkbox next to each of the contacts that you want to merge and click the Merge button. They will be combined into a single contact preserving any meetings, notes, history or sales opportunities that you have created for each of them.
Maybe you want to delete a bunch of contacts at a company that you no longer do business with. Open the contact table and type the company name into the company name filter. You will then see all the contacts for that company. Click on select all. Maybe you want to keep a few, click to uncheck the box next to their names. Then click on the Delete button.
Here's another common problem. You wish to change the contact type of a group of contacts. After opening the table view, select the contacts that you which to change the contact type for and click the checkbox next to their name. Next, below the contact type header, select the new contact type from the dropdown. Then click replace. All of the selected contacts should now show the new contact type in their contact type field. Finally, click save and all of the selected contacts will have the new contact type.
One more great use for the Contact Table. Maybe you want your assistant to call each of your clients and thank them for their business. Click on Display:All and sort by Contact Type. Then next to each contact with Contact Type equal to Client, check the box next to their name. Then click the link Assign a Task to Selected Contacts. Enter the details of the task, making sure to assign the task to your assistant, and then click assign task to selected contacts. Each contact that you selected will now have this new task assigned.
We hope this new feature will help you to better manage your contacts and make Big Contacts even easier to use.