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Archive for the ‘Integrations’ Category

UserVoice Brings Context to Customer Service

In our continuing effort to bring you updates on the latest and greatest tools, including companies that have creatively integrated the FullContact API into their products, here’s our take on UserVoice:

UserVoice provides easy, modern, web-based customer service tools, including a feedback forum and help desk. Their goal is to make it easy and even pleasant to do customer service. UserVoice has 90,000 signups in over 40 countries, so they must be doing something right.

UserVoice’s latest feature, “Inspector,” falls right in line with the goal of making customer service easier. Inspector is a sidebar that brings you contextual information about the person you are trying to help. Context is huge in customer service. If you don’t know what your sales team has previously said to a customer, the problems the customer has already reported, or any personal information beyond their name and email address, it is going to be a lot harder to help them.

Inspector pulls in all the information you might want to know about the customer to whom you are speaking: title, company, social networks, recent tweets (including any about your company), CRM data, recent support issues, and more. And, because Inspector is powered by the FullContact API, this content appears within about five seconds. Here’s how UserVoice compares this speed to traditional methods:

 

“The FullContact API was crucial to this feature,” UserVoice’s CEO, Richard White, told us.  We are glad to have helped, and we are very pleased to see how Inspector uses our API to solve a challenging problem.

If you need some great customer service help desk software, give UserVoice a look, and check out the FullContact API to see how you can integrate our information into your product.  You can try our API for free, and our paid plans start at just $19 per month.  It’s a small price to pay to get a lot more context about your customers and users.

The Magic of Contact Information

Kickoff Labs

One of our exciting customers, KickoffLabs, recently wrote a post touching on several key points about the “magic” of contact data – powered by  FullContact.  To elaborate, here are some key takeaways about why having good contact information is so important for your product:

1.)  Contact data makes your software seem much smarter.  Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote in the third of his three laws that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  So KickoffLabs is correct when they refer to our contact data as “magic” . . . because that’s exactly how it appears to users.  As with any good magic trick, though, the results come from an intricate and well-executed series of non-magical tasks.  There’s nothing spooky going on.  We quickly pull publicly-available information about your contacts, undertake some high level math and statistics to clean up and verify the information, and then push the results back to you.  Plus, like any good magic trick, it happens so quickly that you focus on the beauty of the results, not the underlying mechanics.

2.)  Contact information makes customer signups easier.  KickoffLabs makes the point that, when you have good contact information, you no longer have to ask users for “twenty pieces of data that they are going to lie about anyway.”  How often have we all gone to a website or started to download an app, only to stop due to an overly-complicated signup form?  Nobody wants to spend five minutes inputting their address, age, etc., even if it is useful for the company.  With our API, all you have to do is ask your prospective customers for their name and email (or social handle).  End result: you won’t piss off your users by asking for it, or incite them to lie, so you get more signups and accurate customer information.

3.)  Contact information helps you discover influential users.   If you were responding to a customer service request or routine email, or maybe checking out names for new users, would you want to know that the person on the other end has a ridiculously high Klout score or thousands of Twitter followers?  Of course you would.  Based on our API’s results, you can filter your users to find the most influential ones (or the ones that fit a certain profile) using all the different pieces of information we can pull.  Then you can ensure that these customers get the attention they deserve.

To boot, our API is cheap.  You can signup for a free trial, and paid plans start at just $19 a month.  It’s a very easy way to make your software seem smarter, boost your signups, and improve your customer service.

Contactually Rocked My Inbox

My email filing system is like a grandmother’s basement. Everything is segregated into a Byzantine series of boxes and labels. Items are often mislabeled or stored in the wrong box. The total volume is frightening, and I’m not inclined to take several days and clean it out. But there’s gold hidden in there – important emails that I should follow up on, and contacts with whom I need to maintain a relationship.

Sound familiar?

Like your grandmother’s basement, wouldn’t it be great if someone sorted through your inbox automatically and reminded you of the valuable stuff? Like a digital version of Antiques Roadshow, except you don’t have to dig up the items yourself? That’s similar to what Contactually does for your email.

After you sign up for a free subscription, Contactually processes your email account to identify your important contacts, using cues like how quickly you respond to the person. You can manually organize your contacts into groups, called “buckets,” through a quick and surprisingly engaging bucket game. Contactually then sends you an email every morning and afternoon to remind you to follow up with important contacts. In the emails, you can click a button and type in natural language how you want to respond, such as “follow-up tomorrow.” You can also use the Contactually dashboard to analyze your communication metrics, such as your most frequent correspondents and the days of the week when you email the most. Those metrics are enlightening, to say the least.

Since I started using Contactually, I’ve had several “Wow, I forgot about that guy” moments that helped me improve my networking and relationship management. I’ve also picked up contact with a few close friends who I hadn’t talked to in a while, and I gained some serious insight about my email communication habits and patterns. Basically, my inbox got a lot smarter and transparent.

One of the best parts is that Contactually connects directly to your email account, without the need for browser plug-ins or other software. For business users, Contactually syncs with Salesforce or Highrise CRMs, and is part of the growing family of apps that use the FullContact API to provide rich contact information for users.

Check it out. It may very well remind you to email someone from your past who could help you get your next sale, or your next job.

FullContact Chrome Extension for Salesforce Released

A few months back, we hosted a developer challenge to build a FullContact Google Chrome Extension for Salesforce.

Today, the early beta is available on the Chrome Webstore.  Click here to download.

The goals of the FullContact Chrome Extension were:

  1.  Enable contextual FullContact content inside of Salesforce.com without installing a Salesforce Application.
  2.  Eliminate tedious data entry with an AutoFill function.
  3.  Showcase what kind of applications are possible with the FullContact API.

We like to think of it like “Mingly, but for Salesforce”

We’ve also made it completely open source  on github.  You can get the full source here and tweak as needed.
It’s an early beta (like, version 0.1), so there are going to be several opportunities for improvement.  Feel free to email suggestions anytime to bart@fullcontact.com (or just grab the code and make a pull request!)

 

Intercom integrates with FullContact

Web app developers struggle to understand exactly who their users and customers are. In addition, there are very few lightweight, ‘non-clunky’ solutions to communicate directly with individual users and track the relationship over time. To solve this problem, developers often end up writing custom code or integrating with fairly expensive CRM platforms such as Salesforce. This burns precious development cycles and never quite solves the problem.

Enter Intercom. Intercom is a lightweight CRM for web app developers. (more…)