In our newest blog series, we are discussing the 3rd wave of the cloud conversation – how to manage mission critical business applications in the cloud to increase productivity and realize a greater reduction in the cost of running your business. In first three installments of the series, we covered Geckoboard, a solution for viewing your company’s “vital signs” at a glance, AwayFind, an application for managing email, one of the greatest workplace productivity killers and inDinero, a cloud-based app that offers a real-time dashboard for keeping track of how much your businesses’ financial health. In this edition of the series, we will discuss a cloud-based app that offers a simple interface that makes it easy to track the status of projects and interaction with contacts.
One of the keys to success in running any successful business is making a good impression on a client or prospect by being well prepared and readily remembering the details about your last interaction. Unfortunately, your address book can’t provide you enough good information and often your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can be cumbersome, especially if you are trying to access the information from a smart device. Highrise is an web-based system designed to manage contacts and communications with clients. Contacts can be easily imported from Outlook and then can be sorted by people or company. Every contact in Highrise has a page detailing the history of every interaction including emails, notes from conversations and meetings and reminders for next steps with the contact. During a meeting you can add a note to the page, attach a file to the message and create a task to the note with a due date and a category for follow up such as “call” or “email”. Highrise has a dashboard displaying all of your reminders at a glance. Worried you might miss a follow up? Set the reminder to send you a text message or email alert.
Highrise Cases allow you to group information together for a specific project with a dashboard display of all the messages related to the project and the people involved helping you to manage the project in one place. Tags allow you to group contacts by custom keywords allowing you to group people or companies by a specific skill set or industry.
Highrise has an iPhone app for mobile access and integrates with a number of other popular applications offering really cool addons including ringio which automatically tracks sales and support phone calls as notes and SnapEngage which sends transcripts of your live chats to your Highrise contact pages.
Highrise has a number of plans available including a free version allowing 250 contacts and two users, without file sharing. The basic plan, for $24 a month and up to 5000 contacts is a great option for small businesses.
Learn how your business can benefit from cloud services and hosted applications with our free RevITup SilverCloud Assessment. For more information on solutions for running your businesses’ technology more efficiently, visit our website or contact Megan Meisner at mmeisner@launchpadonline.com or 813 920 0788 x210.
