Not exactly exciting, Customer Relationship Management. Let's start by calling it Collaboration Relationship Management. Nope, still pretty tame. I have to tell you, though, it is a huge part of my work. I would much rather be at the tech table, but to a freelancer or an arts organization, this is where the money gets made.
In the beginning was the email. Fine. What's 50 or so letters to read/write a day? I used to have people to file all this stuff - then I started working for myself!
My basic email approach used to be "try and empty the inbox." Well, that did not work, so then I set up lots of subfolders where emails get sent. I am sure many of you have something similar, sometimes with rules to automatically send messages into those folders as they arrive. This works up to a point but once I got past 50 or so folders it became a little unwieldy. So I cut down the number of folders and now, when I respond to or receive a business email I want to go back to some time, I send it to Batchbook. This service automatically files it with the contact record of the person it was sent to or from.
Just for the record I do not get any kickbacks for recommending these services. I have tried them for myself, so consider them tested rather than just reviewed.
In theory, if we have only communicated 3 or 4 times say 3 years ago, I can see when that happened and what we said. I can always find a contact in my address book, but most of the time I do not have time to waste searching my inbox.
Like most of these web 2.0 services you can try it for free - forever if you only have few hundred contacts. Batchbook
