Customer Profiles: Coast New Zealand

(L to R) Alex Webster and his wife, Nicola, on Waiheke Island, New Zealand

Organization Profile: Coast New Zealand provides a collection of outdoor furniture and accessories with a uniquely enduring appeal. The company’s goal is to unite the best materials with modern design in a stylish marriage of form and function. All of the products are entirely hand-made in New Zealand and designed with quality, originality, utility and an understated style. Its best-selling product is the Marine Bean, the original outdoor beanbag. Originally developed during the 2003 America’s Cup in Auckland, New Zealand, as a comfortable place from which to watch the racing on a super-yacht, it has subsequently found a home in hotels, resorts, villas and homes worldwide. With retailers and customers from Australia to Asia to the Hamptons on New York’s Long Island, the company is based in Herne Bay, Auckland, New Zealand.

Summary: Batchbook, a customizable, Web-based social customer relationship manager (CRM), enables Coast to individualize its contact and service to consumers, retailers or professionals dealing in several regions and currencies around the world. Combing several disparate lists and databases and imposing a consistent categorization, Coast has been able to save time and reach more sales and partnership leads than before.

Website: CoastNewZealand.com

Coast Expands Its Horizon with Batchbook Social CRM

Alex Webster wears many hats at Coast, a New Zealand-based company which provides contemporary outdoor furniture, luggage and accessories. He is the company’s head designer, purchasing manager, production manager, director of sales, finance director, delivery driver and IT support, and he favors the titles “President for Life” and/or “Enlightened Despot”.

With five full-time staff members, including his wife Nicola with whom he founded Coast in 2004, Webster needs to have insight into every part of his organization. Previously, he and the Coast employees spent most of their time in Microsoft Outlook, but as the business grew he discovered they needed a comprehensive customer relationship manager (CRM) solution, not just a bunch of lists and files. After trying out a host of products, the company in May 2009 signed up for Batchbook, a customizable, Web-based social CRM.

Immediately, Webster was struck by the elegance and simplicity of Batchbook in its ability to provide a single solution for the company to manage contacts, communications and social networks. He had previously balked at CRMs that required much more overhead to set-up and run than Coast was willing or able to provide.

“Batchbook works for us because it is simple. It is not a lumbering CRM monster, rather, it is an address book on steroids: a fully functioning database that is powerful yet straightforward to operate,” said Webster. “Batchbook allows us to deal with different customers in different categories on an individual basis. Best of all, it plays well with other small business applications, which expands its capabilities.”

Launching Coast

Coast New Zealand was conceived while Webster and his wife were honeymooning on Great Barrier Island in the Hauraki Gulf, near Auckland, New Zealand. After moving to New Zealand from Hong Kong, they dreamed of creating a premium New Zealand brand based on uncompromising design. Lying on a perfectly secluded beach and looking out to sea, they filled pages of a notebook with ideas, sketches and company names. Both being sailing enthusiasts, they had spent their fair share of time on uncomfortable boating seating and knew there was a better way.

The philosophy behind Coast’s founding was to provide civilized outdoor living with the belief that all should live as comfortably outdoors as they do indoors. The product line, which includes outdoor beanbags, outdoor sofas, outdoor coffee tables, gently moves away from the traditional table, chairs and parasol or uncomfortable picnic tables of years past.

Understanding that most entrepreneurs launch offerings as distinct as Coast’s, BatchBlue Software founders created Batchbook to enable organizations to similarly customize their operations.

The software allows Coast team members to easily log communications, create e-mail and mailing lists and manages tasks. They are able to add SuperTags which are custom fields — including categorizing customers and leads as consumers, retailers or professionals and sub-categorizing them by region and currency — and tag data sets. With retailers in New Zealand, Australia, Asia, the Middle East and the USA and customers worldwide, Coast is able to build relationships between contacts and records more efficiently and to more knowledgably follow-up with them.

Full steam ahead

Almost immediately, Webster noticed a significant time savings from using Batchbook because everyone in the organization can have access to track interactions with multiple contacts.

“The direct benefit of Batchbook has been to create a semblance of order from our previously haphazard attempts at contact and lead management,” explained Webster. “We have now uploaded several disparate lists and databases and imposed a consistent categorization. This has already allowed us to send out 5,000 of our newly printed catalogues to those who requested them, send a follow-up e-mail to leads who we met at a trade show through MailChimp (a BatchBlue Software partner in The Small Business Web), to contact a number of potential retailers in the USA and to log the resulting correspondence for everyone to see.”

His wife Nicola relies heavily on the SuperTag feature which enables her to collect any type of data using date, multiple choice, number or other types of fields. Now, using SuperTags, she can now more quickly organize custom data sets of contacts that she was able to do in previous programs. For example, working from home, Nicola can e-mail a potential retailer, which creates a contact record in Batchbook, and then she can tag them with the Coast-created SuperTag ‘materials request.’ The SuperTag contains customized tick-boxes for the materials she would like the team back in the office to send, including catalogue, swatches and samples, and the type of covering letter required to accompany these materials.

Nicola also uses regularly the BatchBox feature which enables her to automatically store an e-mail as a communication record in Batchbook. She can then attach it to relevant contacts, create a new contact if needed and retain any attachments.

“To some, my work might seem tedious and managerial. I spend more time generating and scrolling through lists and reports,” said Webster. “I am interested in scrolling through lists to see how many contacts we have in a particular region, in a particular category. I flash through dozens of business cards to see which are incomplete. I check which contacts could use a check-in and which ones are being serviced well. Other team members spend more time on individual contacts pages, reading their latest blog entry or tweet.”

Smooth sailing

Beyond the product’s capabilities, Webster has been impressed with the level of individualized customer service he has received from BatchBlue Software. Questions answered directly or through forum posts have all enabled the company to get up-and-running rapidly with Batchbook.

“The BatchBlue team is highly responsive to suggestions and ideas, while remaining cautious of trying to be all things to all people. I commend them for all of their efforts,” said Webster. “As a small company ourselves, we like to do business with small companies that are passionate, competent and responsive.”

Webster said he looks forward to investigating how Coast can benefit from integrating Batchbook with other Web-based services.