“Beware the Ides of March!” said the soothsayer in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The Ides of March, which corresponds to March 15 (today), was the day on which Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C.  It’s the classic story of betrayal–Caesar’s closest friend and advisor, Brutus, was one of the main conspirators in the plot.  But another, equally important and still relevant, theme in the story, is that of the blindness caused by overconfidence.  Caesar had been warned by soothsayers to be on his guard, but he ignored that sign.  His pride angered the gods, so they allowed the plot to come together and bring him down.

Very, very demotivational

Crucially, however, Caesar also surrounded himself by yes-men who fawned over him:  people who had to do his bidding or die.  This (as well as his own character; he was a conquerer by nature) caused him to become more and more isolated from the political realities around him.  His desire to be adored made him willfully ignorant of the dissatisfaction of the Senate with his power hogging.  He forgot that although he was the highest authority in the land, he was still a human being who needed other people to inform his judgment.  He forgot that he needed to keep his finger on the pulse of the people.  It was this that brought him down, far more than his impiety.  If Caesar had been more observant, he could have found so many ways to deal with the situation before it got out of hand.  But that would have required politicking, not just might, and that would have been unbefitting!  No one could tell him what to do, no one could make him feel vulnerable, no one could question his power.  Until they did.

This is a lesson that business leaders should never forget.  Yes, it’s great to be successful, and great to receive positive reports about the health of your company from supportive employees and customers.  Good leaders should also be confident and able to make hard and unpopular decisions when necessary.  But paying attention both to what your advisors have to say AND the often subtle ways they react to what you do is necessary if you want to stay on top.

The 17th century poet John Donne observed that “No man is an island / Entire of itself.”  This is quite a bit out of context, of course, but we have to realize that power and pride can be isolating and blinding.  In a social world even more intertwined than perhaps Donne could have imagined, strength comes in large part from connections, networks, and analysis of subtle trends that often aren’t eager to reveal themselves.

We’re not soothsayers, so we don’t have any dire warnings for today.  But do keep your eyes open; there’s a lot of information out there, and you need to know how to interpret it.  Caesar didn’t have Twitter or Facebook or even a company email account.  He just had some animal guts and his own instincts.  Don’t fall victim to the same traps he did!

Even if you have a product or service that’s meant for traditional markets, the internet is becoming the place to build a positive, authentic, appealing brand.  Delighting the Internet can be a highly efficient way of building customer goodwill, if you get it right.  The Internet’s endless need for entertainment, its desire to ferret out the quirky human interest stories that happen throughout the world, the ease of sharing it offers–all of these can be gold in the hands of the right people.  Our argument here is that understanding and working within Internet folkways can make doing business not only more profitable, but more fun and human as well.

A key Internet folkway is wacky authenticity

Let’s start by defining “folkways.”  They’re a pretty essential concept in sociology, but like a lot of social science concepts, they have a natural application to marketing.  Folkways, first identified by William Graham Sumner, are the norms we have for casual interaction–the social WD40 of a group.  They are informal and vary among communities, but not getting them right will tip community members off that you don’t belong.

The Internet is not a physical place, but it is a community, and it has a more and more well-defined culture.  Although it is diffuse and democratic, it has a lot of power to identify important and interesting things that now routinely bleed over into “real life.”  The Internet enjoys finding chance, spontaneous things and saturating media with them.  The lovely thing about this is that perpetuating these messages is something Internet users want to do–it gives them a chance to build their own identity.  Their public persona is made up of the content they create and share. This, which we’re calling “wacky authenticity,” is a key folkway of the internet.  Understanding this principle can help to garner you endlessly self-perpetuating goodwill.  The key is not to do pandering, highly scripted things, but rather to “surprise and delight.”  Ask yourself, what will people get a status boost out of sharing with their friends?

You might think that these principles are primarily for tech-related companies, or at least those with a big existing web presence.  The good news is that it’s not!  That’s the nature of viral media:  they can come from anywhere, and the more natural and human they are, the more social capital they offer.  Let’s look at an example that began offline, with an interaction between a seller of goods and a curious customer.

If only your business were a cat hattery

Case study: Giraffe Bread

Sainsbury’s is a UK supermarket.  They had a product called “Tiger Bread”–a white bread with a brown crackly top, which makes it look somewhat like a tiger’s markings.  One young customer, a three-year-old child, rightly observed that the crackle pattern was more spotty like a giraffe than it was stripey like a tiger.  She (with an adult helper) wrote a letter to the company explaining that the name should be changed.  Such letters are usually ignored or replied to with dull form letters.  This time, though, one enterprising employee took an extra step; writing a personalized, charming response to the child, which agreed with the name change and included a coupon.  The response letter went viral on the Internet, since it was so cute and gave a kindly human face to a corporate front.  Later, the name of the product was actually changed to Giraffe Bread, following huge demand online.  You can buy it at Sainsbury’s stores today.  Now people all over the world know about this product and want to try it.  Read more here.

What’s the lesson in all this?  Well, think about it:  did you think of Sainsbury’s as a vanguard of viral marketing before this exchange?  No way.  Did they aggressively use high-tech tools to disseminate a slick viral marketing campaign?  No way.  It was the child’s mother who put the exchange on her blog, not the support rep who wrote the letter.  All it took was one person using a little empathy, a little humor, and a traditional channel.  The message sent itself; it wanted to be popularized because it was inherently interesting.

So that’s it:  be human and be interesting?

Yes and no.  You obviously can’t rely on the occasional customer service letter for all your success–you have to have other outreach strategies in place.  These things happen because real people move on them.  Sometimes you’ll get lucky and sometimes you won’t.  But keeping an eye open to what the Internet likes can one day help you to reap huge rewards.

Share in the comments–what do you think a business like yours could do to leverage Internet culture?

Much like with children, there’s no owner’s manual for businesses.  There are always multiple ways to approach business development (within legal limits, of course!), which can make deciding how to guide and plan at a high level challenging.  Sometimes, for example, it’s hard to know how to weigh risk in a given industry, or what the realistic advantages and disadvantages of different  funding schemes are.

Even when the business owner is savvy and experienced, she is going to be spending a LOT of time and emotional energy tending to the business and thinking about the business and living in the business.  This is necessary, of course, but it also creates a certain loss of perspective.  A seasoned advisor who’s able to step back a bit, someone who has been down that path and knows some of the pitfalls, is something any sensible entrepreneur would want, at least at some point.  We’re talking, of course, about business mentors.

Aside from these qualitative observations, there are some hard numbers to support the wisdom of gaining a mentor–small businesses whose leaders were mentored were more than twice as likely to survive for five years as those that weren’t (http://www.oecd.org/cfe/leed/40215457.pdf).  So it’s obvious why a small business owner would want a mentor.  The question that remains, though, is…what’s in it for the mentors?  What do mentors want?

Dr. Freud says you're overanalyzing it

If you ask mentors why they participate in the sometimes time-consuming activities of mentorship relationships, most will express a desire to give back, to impart some of that “if I’d known then what I know now” knowledge to young entrepreneurs.  We can’t forget that being helpful is something that people enjoy.  It’s rewarding to take your own life experiences and use them to improve things for someone else.  Plus it’s an ego boost to see your own experiences validated by a smart, enterprising person who cares about a lot of the same things you do.

Most mentees want mentors who have been successful in the same or a very similar industry, but every business is unique.  The business climate is also always changing in interesting ways.  Being a mentor allows an entrepreneur (by nature, a curious person who likes to understand things by doing them) to learn about something new, and gain fresh perspectives on the business world.

Some mentors are also gaining financially from the relationship–rewarded with equity, board membership, or even a consulting fee.  Not every small business owner can afford to reimburse a mentor financially, and even those who can will have to confront ROI calculations.  This can be good or bad, depending on how you conceive of the relationship.  Board membership can be a good idea because it gives the mentor a more direct incentive to promote the long-term health of the organization.  However, it also gives the mentor some real power, and even entrepreneurs who are most eager for mentorship ultimately want to captain their own ship.

So what’s a business owner to do?  The first step is of course to figure out what you want from a mentor.  But then it’s important to think about what you can offer to a mentor–mentorship is a partnership, not a charity.  The more attractive an experience you provide, the more likely you are to get what you’re looking for.  What makes your business interesting to work with?  What are your growth prospects?  Are you a good listener and a quick learner?  These are all important considerations.

What have your experiences been with mentorship?  We’re really curious to hear how it went!

Back in January, we wrote a post about developing tools and processes geared toward “listening” to your customers.  We established some main areas of need for companies wanting to establish a culture of proactive engagement:

1. Well-crafted listening tools
2. An efficient process for dealing with communications and turning over solutions
3. People who care about building relationships

However, we didn’t go into great detail on any of these principles.  This post will go into detail about our own journey in one of these principles–#2, An efficient process for dealing with communications and turning over solutions. We’re calling this a “customer engagement cycle,” with the implied goal of maintaining the customer’s engagement beyond one-off customer service experiences.

As a company grows, this becomes more and more difficult.  These processes can quickly become bloated, unsustainable monsters that fail to serve even the most basic of purposes:  keeping customers happy and in the loop with relevant information.

If this wasn’t daunting enough, we also think an excellent customer engagement cycle goes a step further:  when interactions with customers reveal problems or gaps in the product, we should reward them for their input and let them know how their ideas have been implemented.  This is a great way of maintaining and developing their engagement.

So how do we decide on a course of action?  Start by thinking through what customer engagement is actually supposed to accomplish, and design your system around that.

The information is out there--but do you have the right tools to pick up on it?

What are the goals of a customer engagement cycle?

For us, proactive listening has several different functions that directly affect the health of the company.  We can choose solutions by considering each function specifically:

1. To remain in contact with customers–following through on issues is part of the customer service process, even outside of any concrete gains to the system
2. To improve the system in ways that we wouldn’t think to
3. As system-level quality control–giving us an idea of where problems tend to cluster tells us how robust the system is in general.  We can then target those areas more heavily for improvement.
4. To gauge the popularity of suggestions; this helps us figure out how to deliver a product a lot of people want.

A really good listening system will be able to accomplish all of these.  It’s a tall order, but there are some simple steps that can be taken toward creating a robust, productive, and sustainable system.  One of the most popular is simply establishing a dedicated public page where users can offer feedback.  Even this has its foibles, however…

The Problems with User Feedback Pages

Virtually every company has an intake mechanism for user problems and suggestions.  But simply having a system doesn’t mean that it’s working in the best interest of everyone concerned.  Consider the following real-life example:

A large and reputable software company has a Uservoice page for feedback on one of its popular products.  There are several strict rules for participation (restrictive word limits, complex guidelines for assigning votes, removing suggestions that don’t become features).  Although this is perfectly understandable from a logistical perspective–the company doesn’t want the page to become a sprawling, repetitive gripe-fest–it works against the intended purpose.  Systems like Uservoice aren’t just supposed to be a passive information-gathering tool; they’re also supposed to be a mechanism for public accountability.  Worse yet, having so many rules for participation can discourage a lot of potentially helpful customers from contributing.

At karma, we do make use of Uservoice to discover new ideas, as well as to find out how interested our users are in them.  But we don’t rely on it exclusively; many of our greatest ideas come from phone calls with users, support tickets, training sessions, and sales emails.  Only the most opinionated usually gravitate to a feedback page, so many of our users with great ideas wouldn’t be captured this way.  This is why employing a range of customer interactions for product discovery has been so useful.  Once we get the ideas, we can develop them right away–or we can post them on Uservoice ourselves!  The main idea is that these different interactions work in tandem.

Another process we’re experimenting with–with great results so far–is combining our internal changelog with notifications to users about their suggestions that have been implemented.  When we mark changes, we simply note whether a user suggested the change, then email the user(s) and change the status of the issue.  We hope one day to bring this into a public forum.  Sharing credit does us no harm, and gives customers something to feel proud of.  We don’t want to hide the fact that a customer has given us an idea–quite the contrary.  We hope that she will share it publicly!

Passively Agile via Active Engagement

Here’s another way to think of it, for those of you who are fans of Agile-type development.  Agile conceives of programmers, testers, and participating customers as a single development team.  Everyone is valuable and accountable.  Agile usually has to do with software that’s being custom built, but even proprietary software like ours can use this model.

When we involve our broad base of users, they’re giving us use cases; they use the system in ways we can’t even imagine.  We try to be really broad minded and creative, but any time you’re really entrenched in a system, you get a little myopic.  Involved customers keep us honest, and that in turn makes us more effective as a company.

Share your own strategies for growing customer engagement in the comments below!

There are so many tools available to small businesses today, it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming and make you long for the good old days when all you had was a land-line telephone, a bottle of whiskey in your desk drawer, and sturdy walking shoes. As far as we’re concerned, the positives about the modern social networking age far outweigh the negatives – as long as you have the tools and support to take advantage of all the opportunities out there.

Social Media:  Being seaworthy on the vast ocean of information

One problem that arises for many businesses is that they concentrate, at first, entirely on building up their list of contacts – friends, followers, likes and connections. This is, naturally, the essential first step; you can’t implement a marketing strategy if you don’t have anyone to market to! But it’s just Step One, and all too often businesses don’t have a Step Two.   The exciting possibilities of social media can soon become insurmountable challenges if you don’t have a plan. What do you do with it all once you have all of these leads?

The obvious: lukewarm calls

If you’ve gotten a like, a friend request, a follow, or some other voluntary connection from someone on the social media platforms you utilize, it doesn’t take a brilliant intuitive leap to suggest having a sales rep contact them. One advantage here is that the psychological barrier isn’t as high as it is for cold calls: the person may not necessarily be thinking about getting a sales response from you when they click “Like,” but they clearly have warm feelings towards your business. In addition, social media users have become conditioned to expect reactions to their actions–you won’t be committing a faux pas by following up.

Keep in mind that when you contact someone you’ve gathered via social media, you have a lot of information about them. Use it! Your sales reps can quickly get some idea of why they like your business and what their needs might be before they make that first outreach.

The less obvious: lead farming

One of the most powerful aspects of social media is, unsurprisingly, the “social” aspect. When one person invites you into their social media circle, you have access not only to one person who is at the very least interested in the type of business that you do; you also have access to their circle of friends, followers, or professional contacts. This is a perfect opportunity to spend some time looking through profiles and identifying other people in their circles who might be interested in your services or products.

Engagement

Contacting people who have liked your page or made positive comments about your business and engaging them can lead to spontaneous,public endorsements of your product or customer service – public endorsements that are instantly transmitted to a wide range of people. This can be more powerful than simple advertising; in today’s world people are very aware of advertising and very distrusting of it. But personal recommendations by people they trust and admire remain absolute gold.

On the flip side, the social media contacts you have acquired are also perfect opportunities for some active customer service outreach. Monitoring social media for complaints or comments about your company allows you to reach out to any customer having a problem involving your business, or to contacts having difficulty getting in touch with you, or even people singing your praises. Instead of passively waiting for customers to contact you when they need something, you can foster a conversation. When customers think of your business as a friendly, problem-solving entity instead of simply a service, they will be inclined to spend more time (and money) with you above other businesses.

Analytics

The term analytics is becoming one of those buzzwords that everyone throws around to sound smart – but the fact is using analytics on the social media contacts you’ve built up is one of the best ways to make that data work for you. Analytics can be used in a variety of ways: You can analyze the contact list itself, looking for patterns. You can search through profiles and Twitter streams of contacts looking for keywords that apply to your business – if your service or product is in their conversation, they may need your help! You can also look at patterns in your contacts list to see where your new customers are coming from so you can narrow your outreach, or analyze which groups of your contacts do the most business with you, so you can concentrate on the groups you get the most back from. The information is there, it just requires a discerning human mind to leverage it.

Use social media smarter, not harder

No matter what you choose to do, the important takeaway is this: Once you’ve done the hard work of building those social media contacts, you have to integrate them with customer relations management strategies and tools to get the return on your effort.

What are your thoughts? How have you used social media conversion to improve your business?

On Monday, January 31, karma got some fabulous exposure from Sarah Schmid at Xconomy Detroit, following a conversation she had with our founder JP Narowski late last year.  Sarah not only had some great things to say about the system, but the way we run our business as well.  It’s a well-known reality that small business is the great engine of the American economy, and our vision is to fire that engine with karma.  We then want to take what we’ve learned from working with other businesses to create comprehensive but very flexible resources for small businesses everywhere to improve their processes and grow sustainably.

Advantage via necessity

In her article, Sarah described us in a way that inspires us to work even harder:  responsive, community minded, lean, and agile.  What does that mean for us?  Let’s dissect those terms a little bit.

“Lean” and “agile” can sometimes have connotations of haste, flying by the seat of your pants, and incompleteness, but for us that’s really a virtue.  Like the great majority of our customers, we are a small business, and like most startups, we are bootstrapping our operation.  In these situations, efficiency is not a nice thing to have, it’s a requirement if you want to continue doing business.  Large enterprises are often counseled to “think like a startup,” but for us, necessity really is the mother of invention.  Rather than bringing in a massive infrastructure, we add value by being responsive and personal.  In return, we gain value by listening to our customers and bringing them on as co-creators.  Moving to an agile-type model of software development is something we are concentrating on now, and we think it will have a lot of benefits for us and for our customers, especially as we move toward karma2.

In the real world, doing it well often means doing it well enough

When you’re creating any product, it’s very easy to become addicted to perfection.  Obviously, anything worth doing is worth doing well.  But the danger of adhering too closely to that approach in the productivity software business is that the architecture of the software becomes the end itself, and not the means.  We think of karma as being a functional thing–it meets its goals when it’s useful.  What we are learning to do is to embrace the idea that moving quickly on something and adapting to customers’ needs is its own form of “robustness.”  It’s a robustness of process and customer engagement.  There are short, well-defined cycles:  not only are customers involved, but both they and developers see the fruits of their labor quickly.

Share what you’ve learned

Do you have any success stories?  Any hard-won wisdom on iterating and innovating?  We’d love for you to share your thoughts!  Add your comment below.

[This is a follow-up to our December 27 post, “Being customer-driven means sharing power, and that’s a good thing."]

We think karma is a pretty excellent CRM, and we’re continually working to improve it.  But you may not realize just how many of the best parts of karma began as customer suggestions.  Task participants, a “companies” tab, important dates, and so many more have come from our wonderful users.  Karma would not be what it is today without direct customer engagement, and we are so grateful for that.  Since we’ve benefited so much from customer input, we should continually be trying to find new ways not just to help our customers, but to learn from them. So, how do we ensure that this dialogue continues?

Until now we’ve been talking in pretty abstract terms, and it’s all too easy to pay lip service to the idea of customer service.  But here’s the main idea, in terms of actionable solutions: If we’re really going to establish a partnership with our customers, we have to learn to listen. Active listening in business is very much a skill that can be built, as long as you have a willingness to learn.  A lot of our interactions with customers come in the form of support tickets and short emails.  There’s a lot that can fall through the cracks.  What we (and others with similar goals) need are the following:

1. Well-crafted listening tools. Our customer support system needs to be clear and easy for the customer and for the company to use, and its design needs to facilitate timely, effective responses.  We use Zendesk and Uservoice in tandem.  We can manage tickets and suggestions straight from email, then aggregate and analyze the information to see if there are any important trends.  We’ll soon be growing our Uservoice page into a full-fledged community page, where we’ll showcase some of the improvements we’ve made that have come straight from customers.  It’s going to be fabulous, so we hope you’ll join the fun!

2. An efficient process for dealing with communications and turning over solutions. This isn’t just an issue of getting the right software, but of having an intelligent business process in place.  Think about it–do you have a standard procedure for maintaining service information so that customers don’t have to dig up old tickets themselves?  If you have an escalation process, is it mercifully quick or is it a nightmare carousel of pass-offs?  A little time on the front end can save you and your customers not only time, but a lot of money in headache pills.

3. People who care about building relationships. Customer service work is absolutely integral to a company’s operation.  People who do these jobs have so many important roles–they’re the gatekeepers, the teachers, the change management front line, and the point-of-contact sales force for existing customers.  Their performance makes or breaks a company’s health, especially in subscription-based products like ours.  They should be hired and trained with great care, and they need to be shown how valuable they are.  Thinking about how much risk you run by not attracting and rewarding the best customer service reps should really give you pause.

Just like our software, our complement of listening tools is constantly being developed.  We have the passion, now we need to invest our time and resources into making our customer service even more awesome!

What do you think?  Share your ideas and impressions in the comments.  What innovative listening tools and processes have you discovered?

Further reading:

• http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2012/12/17/social-business-model/
• http://www.peterstark.com/2012/customers-feel-heard/
• Shout out to local legend Zingerman’s! http://www.winningworkplaces.org/library/success/servant_leaders.php

We at karma are all about you, the customers.  Isn’t that obvious?  We’re a CRM after all.  Of course, being a CRM isn’t the same as being customer-driven.  You are the focus of our company — your experiences, both good and bad, help shape and improve our system.  Solving your problems doesn’t only help you, it helps your peers AND us.  We love hearing from all of you.  When you are willing to work with us on your issues, we’re able to make karma better.  We’ve promoted this spirit of cooperation from the beginning, and we couldn’t be happier with where we are today and where we’re heading tomorrow.  There should be no question what is at the philosophical and operational center of karma. The answer is simple: fostering genuine relationships with all of you, and creating new ones.  And that means sharing ownership of the company’s public face.

Customer service isn’t the new marketing:  they’re part of the same process

This concept of being customer-driven can be applied pretty broadly, and it’s been on our minds a lot recently.  Denis Pombriant wrote an excellent article for SearchCRM on December 17 (“Social media sets the stage for improving customer service”), and our founder John Paul Narowski felt compelled to comment:

To us at least, customer service and marketing not only employ a lot of the same channels nowadays, they are also under the same big umbrella of outreach. The people we want to have ongoing conversations with about our brand and products are much the same people we want to assist and impress with customer service. And really great customer service is its own form of marketing anyway; it’s communicating with existing customers about our values as a customer-driven company in the way we help them with their frustrations. Then when they have a great experience, they mobilize for us.

And indeed, you have been incredible allies to us!  But we have to be mindful that it works both ways.  As Peter Stark said, if we don’t bend our ear to our customers, they’ll find a way of making their displeasure known, usually publicly.

Whether in ketchup or in digital ink, the truth will out

And they should!  We as a company have a much bigger sphere of influence thanks to social media, but we share that sphere and its power with our customers.  Our marketing isn’t about hard selling or trickery.  It’s about reaching out to like-minded people who vibe with what we do and could benefit from it.  By the same token, customer service is about widening our channel of communication with the people we’ve established a connection with.  It’s all part of one big process of relationship-building.

What do you think?

What innovative approaches have you taken in opening and growing a dialogue with your customers?  What missteps have you seen that made you cringe?  Share your tales of triumph or disaster in the comments!

There’s been a lot of great writing recently on CRM, customer service, social tech, and all those other good things.  Here are some of the best we’ve read this week:

Leonard Kile at destinationCRM, “Customers Should Help Create Major Innovation”

http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/Customers-Should-Help-Create-Major-Innovation—86738.aspx

This was a great piece about how to engage with customers and why they are among the most valuable partners in innovation.  Our next blog post will touch on this theme, and Leonard’s post was a big source of inspiration.

Rami Khater at the Huffington Post, “Social Media Evolution, not Revolution”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rami-khater/social-media-evolution-no_b_2338465.html?utm_hp_ref=technology&ir=Technology

Rami writes about the normalization of social media in journalism and the effect nationalist control of social media has on what we still think of the “social media revolution.”  It’s a prescient look at a lot of different influences on the marketplace of information and what it will become.

Brent Leary, “Enter Sandman: the Bullpen Cometh”

http://crm2.typepad.com/brents_blog/2012/12/enter-sandmen-the-bullpen-group-cometh.html

This was an exciting post from industry thought leader Brent Leary about a research group he and three other CRM luminaries (Paul Greenberg, Denis Pombriant, and Esteban Kolsky) are forming.  We can’t wait to see what insights will come from this collaboration!

Kelly Liyakasa at destinationCRM, “Badgeville CEO Chris Duggan’s 2013 Gamification Predictions”

http://www.destinationcrmblog.com/2012/12/17/badgeville-ceo-kris-duggans-top-3-gamification-predictions/

Kelly interviews the CEO of Badgeville, a gamification platform provider. We’re fascinated with the idea of gamification (the practice of incorporating game elements into other areas of life to encourage certain behaviors, like repetitive work tasks), so this discussion with a major player in the field was extremely interesting.

Denis Pombriant at SearchCRM, “Social media set the stage for improving customer experience”

http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/opinion/Social-media-set-the-stage-for-improving-customer-experience

Customer service is the new norm, and social media has a lot of opportunity to improve customer service drastically.  It has even greater potential pitfalls.  Denis Pombriant applies his usual incisive analysis to warn us that a bare-bones approach of simply answering questions is no longer enough.

Time to get excited!

[edited]

While our blog and Twitter feed might have been quiet over the past few months, we can assure you our development team has been anything but. We’ve been hard at work on karma2 over the past and are getting very close to its completion. We’re all excited about where it’s going, and can’t wait to unveil all the wonderful new features your business will benefit from!  What we need now is your feedback and input to ensure we got it all right.

We’re all familiar with that highly anticipated version 2 launch that changes everything you love and ruins your experience. We’re determined to avoid that with karma2.

• Same Ol’, Same Ol’. We’ve kept the interface you know and love. We’re adding new features without losing the ones you’re already using.
• Keeping karma1 online. Making full-scale system transitions can be a major pain point for businesses.  That’s why we’ll be keeping karma1 online for a while after the official launch in Q1 2013.  That way, if we got something wrong, we can fix it while you keep your account on karma1.  Crisis averted!
• We’re listening intently! We need your help to ensure we got everything right. Please take some time to explore karma2 (use login nonadmin@karmacrm.com and password nonadmin) and verify that the features you love are still present and working properly.

What’s new to karma2?

You can now add multiple users, contacts, companies, and so on to tasks and events. If you add multiple users, each will receive notification reminders via email.

Tasks

Events

We aim for simplicity.  But sometimes that can go too far.  Our old task system was too simple for many of our customers’ needs, so we decided to give it a lot more power. If you want to keep using tasks as you did before, no big deal, but we’ve added task lists, additional filters, and sorting to beef up your project management.

We’ve revised the “See More” menu so now it slides out from the right and will take full advantage of modern wider screen monitors. You can customize the widgets so you always see what’s important to you, no matter where you are in the system.

This is what it looks like once it’s expanded (to customize, click “Settings”):

The files section can now have folders so you can better organize the files you’ve uploaded.

These are just some of the features we’ve added but we’ll save the exhaustive list for our official press release. We very much appreciate all of your support and patience to get us here, and are very excited for karma2 in 2013.

What’s still under development

Aside from a lot of general polish and backporting of minor features from karma1, here are a few things our team is still burning the midnight oil on:

• Sending Email – The ability to send email from within karma2 isn’t there yet, but should be added in December along with email templates.
• Reporting – We’re putting the finishing touches on the reporting in karma2 and that should also be present soon. We’re making every report exportable and adding more customization to many of the reports.
• Task Templates – Create standard task templates to save time with repeated/similar tasks.

How can I take it for a spin?

We’d love for you check out what we have so far. Send us an email to support@karmacrm.com requesting an invitation to our demo system and we’ll get you set up. The more feedback you can provide, the more confident we’ll all be that we got it right.

We are currently seeking beta testers to help us get karma2 ready for launch. If you’d like to partner with us in helping karma become the best it can be, we’ll show our gratitude by giving you a free month on any account.  Email support@karmacrm.com for more information, or wait for our next blog post (coming soon!).

When can I move my account over?

We’re already using karma2 ourselves and have moved over a number of willing customers as well. We ask that you take karma2 for a spin first before making the decision, but we’d be happy to move your account over sooner if you’re ready. You’d be a good fit for this transition period if you don’t make heavy use of deals or reporting and primarily focus on contact management.

When is the official launch date?

We’re shooting for sometime in Q1 of 2013 for launch. This means that all accounts will migrated over from karma1 to karma2 by then, and all the features in karma2 will be fully vetted and operational.