Five Questions With: Christelle Lachapelle

Christelle Lachapelle is the brand-development manager at Providence-based customer relationship management solutions company Batchbook.
At Batchbook, the RISD alum is responsible for marketing projects, design and events. She heads up the company’s involvement with the BarCamp Tour.
Lachapelle spoke to Providence Business News about her company’s history, its new integration with LinkedIn and common problems among new clients.

PBN: What’s the story behind the name “Batchbook?”
LACHAPELLE:
Batchbook, the name of our first product and now the name of our company, arose from the “book” of a good old-fashioned physical address book. We have digitally super-charged that book with the ability to perform “batch” actions including adding or deleting and tagging or untagging contacts. We’ve made list creation, slicing and dicing much more efficient than using cumbersome spreadsheets or hard copy files.

PBN: You just announced a new integration with LinkedIn, can you tell us a bit about that?
LACHAPELLE:
LinkedIn connects the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful, a mission that mirrors our own. This integration is great for businesses that build out long lasting relationships through the people they know, their contacts. By connecting to LinkedIn inside of your social CRM, you can stay up to date with important contacts, even as they change jobs or get promotions. As you prepare to contact a customer, you can double check to make sure you have up to date information on them and you can read what they have been posting on LinkedIn. You can also go right to their LinkedIn profile from Batchbook, so you can comment on updates and send messages directly to your contacts. We see this as another way we help small businesses establish and cultivate a personal touch with the contacts in their customer database while taking advantage of the efficiency of technology.

PBN: What do you offer your clients that they can’t get from other services?
LACHAPELLE:
Batchbook is constantly integrating with other services so that your contact list is not a static one, but rather a tool enmeshed with your email manager, your web forms, your social networks or your digital signatures app, for example. We are working everyday to make our own new connections for our software. Also, our customer service is second to none with the individual attention our clients receive.

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PBN: What’s the biggest problem you see among new clients?
LACHAPELLE:
Our new clients are primarily small business owners who are tight on time and budget. They are looking to get up and running fast, and they don’t want to spend a lot of money. We offer them an inexpensive solution and free onboarding. The onboarding sessions, which vary in length by plan level, are a chance for clients to have an in-depth conversation with Batchbook specialists about how to setup their account, how they are using Batchbook, what steps you can take to get more out of it and to find out how other small businesses are making it work for them.

PBN: What advice do you have to small business owners who aren’t necessarily the most tech savvy?
LACHAPELLE:
Just dive in! The only way to overcome the tech savvy learning curve is to play around with a piece of software or device and explore all it can do for you. At our company, we have people available to guide clients who less comfortable around technology. We’ve seen that many folks fear technology because of the big giant “delete” function. Our recommendation: backup your files, and you can always retrace your path if you take a misstep.

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