Spenser Tang-Smith of WebGreek on how his team uses Highrise:
I work for a start-up company called WebGreek, and we make a living selling websites to fraternities and sororities, as well as providing a suite of online tools for chapters to stay organized. We launched our main platform earlier this year (St. Patty’s day to be precise), and since then we’ve been able to sign a national contract, deploy dozens of websites, and bring on thousands of users.
We meet a lot of people through fraternity and sorority conventions, as well as through our social media efforts. We need to be able to stay on top of every conversation, because we see our customers as more like friends and partners than clients. In this tightly networked market, where developing a relationship with the customer over a long period of time is paramount, we need to have the history of our relationship with any given contact at our fingertips.
Highrise is the easiest and best service we’ve come across, and we constantly exclaim throughout the office that “Wow, Highrise exceeded my expectations yet again!” Let me explain why:
As we started gathering contacts from our first big trade show earlier this year, I started looking into CRM programs that we could use to track leads, contacts, and customer service requests. We’d been on another CRM tool for a while, but after one big import, we pretty much stopped using it. There were too many fields, too many modules, and the system wasn’t as flexible as we needed it.
After a week of frustration, a friend in a similar situation suggested I explore Highrise. At first, to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. There seemed to be a dearth of features. After playing with the Free version for a few days, I realized that I’d found the platform that we’d be trusting our startup hopes and dreams to. We soon upgraded to Plus.
The single best part of Highrise, as far as I’m concerned, is the simple and flexible way that the modules interact with each other. Anyone can add a note to a contact, case or deal, and then add a follow-up task to it if necessary. Just about anything can be attached to anything else, which allows us to come up with our own set of guidelines for using the platform that mimics the way we handle our customer relationships. We are constantly discovering new little tricks and hacks that make tracking our sales and customer service activities that much easier. Our method of using Highrise has evolved quite organically from the start, and it has always been fluid and effective.
As far as specific features go, we love the email dropbox. The ability to add a BCC to an email and have it automatically track the conversation means that we actually do it. Copy/pasting the text of an email to a contact adds another tedious step that is easy to forget, and all it takes for us to lose a big sale is one foolish email to a fraternity executive.
The Dashboard provides a quick glance so that the whole team (all four of us!) can stay up to date on what’s been happening with our various sales leads. It also helps us keep track of customer service requests, as we can simply add a note to a customer’s contact profile after responding to their issue.
Spenser Tang-Smith: "Our core team at our first big trade show, when we realized it was time to start tracking all of our customer interactions."
We are in a small, competitive market, and the biggest single offering that distinguishes us from the competition is our stellar attention to customer relationships. In a market full of freemium offerings, we’ve established ourselves as a premium product that is worth paying for. We do so by providing a better customer experience, and part of that experience is the level of personalized attention we give to our members. Without Highrise, attaining that level of service would be impossible.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.
