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BatchBlue Teams Up for Small Business Web Partnerships

April 28, 2009

BatchBlue Software, which sells a social customer relationship manager for small businesses and entrepreneurs, has announced that BatchBook now integrates with FreshBooks, an online invoicing and time tracking service and Shoeboxed, a receipt and business card scanning service.


The idea behind the integration of these applications, along with an existing sync with e-mail services company MailChimp, is the launch of the Small Business Web partnership, a movement described by BatchBlue officials as bringing together "like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to assimilate their products and make life easier for small businesses."

"We know our partners, we are customers of our partners and we feel very comfortable recommending them to our own customers," says BatchBlue President Pamela O'Hara. "Providing a single place to access information from these systems makes a lot of sense from our perspective."

The Small Business Web was born when representatives of the founding companies met up at this year's South By Southwest Interactive Festival. They realized they were already beginning to integrate with each others' products and figured that hey, even more integration would be an asset to small business owners trying to manage their data and run their businesses.

The integration features and partnerships let small businesses organize and track contacts such as customers, prospects, vendors or industry acquaintances and monitor their social media activity including blog posts, tweets and bookmarks to gain insights and turn conversations into customers as well as tie invoices, expenses and billing to account communications for faster bookkeeping and better oversight.

"I'm always on the outlook for anything that saves me time and makes my life easier," said BatchBlue customer C.C. Chapman, co-founder of new media consultancy The Advance Guard, saying BatchBook's recent integration with Shoeboxed "saves me hours of inputting data."

In March industry observer Dan Costa, at SXSW, wrote that "Firms like FreshBooks, BatchBlue, and Shoeboxed are delivering software-as-a-service with a distinctly social agenda. The solutions they're building could rival offerings of the Web giants like Google and Yahoo. For example, if you sign up for BatchBlue's CRM and contact-management solution, you can manage your customer billing through FreshBooks from within the same interface."

David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for ContactCenterSolutions here.

Edited by Patrick Barnard



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