BatchBook Extends The Reach of Small Business CRM

BatchBook has always been positioned a small business CRM company, and with some recent additions to their product, they may begin changing what that CRM segment is all about. The co-founders of the three-year-old company are in awe of the capabilities social media provide, and one of their recent platform updates is a social contact manager with increased sales functionality. Another upgrade was an integration with web-based help desk software provider Zendesk, which is not the type of integration you’d most expect from a small business CRM offering.

The social network integration adds depth to the contact management space, and BatchBook’s product allows users to track their contacts’ conversations and generally get a better idea of what they are talking about. The dashboard is customizable and supports a number of social networks, from Twitter to LinkedIn to Flickr, and users can generate lists by searching, and by tagging functionality with the Social Media SuperTag.

There were also a number of new features added to BatchBook for Sales, like customized fields for deals management, a complex calendar, and a module for assigning leads to sales associates. BatchBook is also a part of The Small Business Web, which is a community of companies with open APIs, allowing them to integrate their offerings more easily.

The Zendesk integration provides users with a dashboard widget that displays open Zendesk tickets assigned to them, and it also provides an activity log widget on each contact record that displays any Zendesk tickets submitted by a contact. It offers a nice range of capabilities for BatchBook users, but it’ll be interesting to see exactly how many such features the company continues to add, as it could crowd the space traditionally offered in small business CRM packages.

Tags: BatchBook, CRM Trends, Small Business CRM, Social Media, Zendesk