A new Customer Relationship Management system called HighriseHQ was finally released recently. Here at MediaRica we’ve been fans of 37 Signals products for a while and we have been anxiously awaiting this release from one of the most highly acclaimed Web 2.0 companies, 37 Signals. We run all of our projects using Basecamp and all of our new development projects are in Ruby on Rails. The people at 37Signals created the Rails framework for the Ruby programming language in order to help the development of Basecamp. Since the 1980’s I have wrestled with various ways to track contacts from using 4Th Dimension on the Macintosh to ACT and Goldmine, then finally Open Source offerings like Sugar CRM and vTiger. I have to say that the HighriseHQ is certainly the easiest to work with, that I have seen so far.
I won’t be doing a full product review in this post (maybe we’ll post more comments in this thread later on). But, I wanted to highlight one outstanding feature that just makes my life much simpler.
Email-CRM integration made simple:
HighriseHQ lets you set up an email drop box, that you should save as an address in your email client (whatever you use). While emailing, BCC this address or forward an old email to the dropbox and like magic the info appears in your HighriseHQ dashboard, recent history. And the person you were corresponding with in the email automagically becomes a contact in the CRM system with the contacts email filled in. In the dashboard, you can then just click on the new contact’s name to get to the contact editor view, where you can easily add additional notes or tags. It also takes about 30 seconds to add a note and a task such as phoning the contact in a week. A seamless CRM application, it’s best claim is the Zen like simplicity that is characteristic of other 37 Signals products.
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