Highwire: Another Great Web App from 37 Signals

I've been a big fan of BaseCamp from 37 Signals for a while. We use it as an online, collaborative project management application to help develop effective Web sites with our clients.

Recently, I discovered that the good folks at 37 Signals have released an online contact manager and simple CRM application called Highrise. For a while we've been looking for an online tool to share customer contact info among our crew, so I was excited to test drive Highrise.

Despite a few surprising omissions, my experience with Highrise has been great.

I had been using two related programs called Now Contact and Now Up-to-Date to manage my contacts and calendar. Unfortunately, the programs crashed too often, the database got corrupt, and there were simple problems that should have been fixed before it was released. When I complained, tech support told me that I should buy their newer, more expensive program, Nighthawk.

Importing my contacts into Highrise was a simple process. It plays best with the common vCard format, but you can import generic CSV (comma separated values) files as well. Unfortunately, my notes from the previous programs weren't copied over, but that's par for the course.

One thing I was surprised to see was that people and companies were treated differently. In other words, if I imported John Doe from MegaCorp, it would create two entries; one for John Doe and one for MegaCorp. Unfortunately, the contact information (address, phone, Web site, etc.,) isn't carried over to the company. If I want the info there I need to copy and paste it in, one field at a time. If I add another contact to MegaCorp I need to copy and paste all that info in again.

Your Contacts

Above is what you see for any of your contacts. You'll see the client's photo, name, title and company. (For the example above, my dad, there's no title or company as he's self-employed.) By clicking on either a title or company you'll be taken to a page of everyone with that title or the information for that company, respectively.

You'll also see the tags that you've assigned this contact. Tags can be whatever you make them. I created Clients, Blog, TypePad, Ezine, Constant Contact and others so that I could readily identify what we're doing for each client. By clicking on any tag I see all the contacts with that tag. Then I can export that list and generate an email or snail mail list. That way, if I want to contact all of my clients with TypePad blogs I can do so quickly and easily.

In the right column you can add a task that's related to a contact or even a specific note for a contact. By clicking on the add a task button you get the following:

If you have set up other "users"  in Highrise--say your co-workers--you can assign a task to them instead of yourself. You can choose whether the task will be private or public (to other users, but never to all of your contacts.) You can also choose from several pre-determined categories, To-Do, Call, Meeting, etc., or create your own. Your tasks can be emailed to you on a regular basis if you like. Surprisingly, you can't subscribe to them via RSS, although you can subscribe to other Highrise elements--such as a particular contact--through RSS.

Another sweet feature is how you can easily attach emails and documents to a client. By clicking on the email address you generate an email to the contact, but also a bcc to a special Highrise email that then deposits the email and any attachment into the system. Unfortunately, any responses to your email don't automatically go into Highrise. You may need to copy and paste those responses (or your notes) into Highrise manually.

There's also a feature called Cases. Cases are like small projects that you can bring a number of people into. I haven't played around with this yet, except to setup a series of back burner projects for the flyte crew that we never seem to get around to, and forget about on those rare occurances that we have down time.

Like all of 37 Signals products, this one plays nice w/the Mac. I was able to quickly export my files into Apple's Address Book that syncs automatically w/my spanking new iPhone. In fact, it was Highrise that pushed me over the edge to buy an iPhone. Knowing that I could access and update my contacts from anywhere AT&T or wifi reached was a big plus.

This is a fairly new product, and of course there are some missing items that I'd like to see. There's no automatic syncing w/other 37 Signal products. There's no calendar program; I find myself using tasks to remind myself of meetings and then putting them manually into iCal (or whatever calendar program you prefer.) It would be nice if you could have all events automatically output in iCal format, similar to what 37 Signals already does in Basecamp.

37 Signals has been good in the past of listening to customers and adding requested features. It also allows a ecosystem of products from 3rd party providers to sync w/their products. For example, we use Tick in conjunction with Basecamp to track and bill our projects. The downside of this is now we have two monthly bills rather than one. I'm hoping that 37 Signals adds some of the basic functionality other CRM's offer quickly:

Wish List:

• Better Tag Management: It would be nice to be able to assign a tag to multiple people at once.
• Better search: It would be great to have a more advanced search where I could pull up all of my contacts that lived in Maine, or had a Texas zip code, or had a specific area code. That would allow a user to quickly target a specific audience.
• Duplicate Contact: If I'm adding a new contact from a company in the system it should pre-populate the company information OR I should be able to "duplicate" a contact and then update name, phone extension and email.
• Multiple Companies per Contact: I have several clients who work for different companies or do volunteer work for another organization. I should be able to attach them to more than one entity.
• iCal Export: BaseCamp has a great feature where I can export my calendar (meetings, to-do's, etc., that doesn't yet exist in Highrise.

Compared to Other Products...
I'm sure you'd like to know how this matches up to Act, Goldmine or Salesforce. Unfortunately you won't get that information here. I haven't used Act! in years, and don't have any relevant experience with other CRM's outside of Now, which I've abandoned.

Although this isn't everything I need (yet), the ability to share contact info with my crew, access my information from any computer (or iPhone) connected to the Internet, and sync it with programs on my Mac makes this a great resource for flyte. I'm looking forward to the obvious enhancements, but for right now this product is off to a great start with an opportunity to become another essential product from 37 Signals.

Rich Brooks
Highriser

Comments

[Shama Hyder]

Interesting Rich. I, myself, use Win Web for CRM purposes. http://www.WinWeb.com.

[Bob Wilson]

Well nice to see that someone like 37signals products. I have to confess, I gave up on them. There were some real problems with project IDs. Then we could not set due dates and our tasks were left without control. Oh well, we switched to Wrike http://www.wrike.com/ and we now run everything, including CRM there.

[asif]

Hi , briefly skimmed the article, but i would suggest the first port of call for a newbie to CRM ...or even if you are looking to plan a CRM programme, is to look at an online application offered via the guys at Zoho.com. Its the Zoho CRM product, which is very flexible ...and free. We at www.fones4free.com have started to develop our system based on it and like the online aspect of things. And of course,its free. So, alot less of a concern when you have to argue a case for a return on investment.

I know this is a plug fo another product, ( which i have no kick back from... obviously, as its free) But i would suggest it is a perfect place to test out ideas before purchasing a more comprehensive CRM option.

Let me know what you think.