One of the very crucial elements of a company’s web site is to generate opportunities to make connections with people. When connections are made, you get an opportunity to help someone, to solve problems, and, ultimately, to gain new clients, to sell products or services.

When your business is small, managing your contacts and tracking your interactions with them can easily be done with Gmail, with Outlook, or even with a simple spreadsheet. However, once your business grows, you quickly find yourself needing more powerful tools to manage your clients.

We’ve tried many CRM systems including Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and a few other solutions. All great products, all with their pros and cons. But then, back in 2007, when 37signals launched Highrise, a simple but efficient Customer Relationship Management system, with no hesitation, we tried it. It does exactly what we need without unnecessary bells and whistles. It got the job done! Since then, we are using it to track all our marketing efforts, all the opportunities we are involved in, etc…

Now, with the launch of our new site, it was very important for us to link our contact form with our Highrise account. This has easily been accomplished thanks to the easy to use Highrise API and the great developers at INBOX. A few lines of code and the integration was a success. So now, when someone fills out our contact form, 4 things are happening:

• A new contact is created on Highrise
• A new note is added to this contact, with the content of the message text area of our form
• A task is created, linked to this note, assigned to a member of our team, and is set to be completed in the next 24 hours
• An email notification is sent to our team to let them know a new contact has been made.

All the greatness of simple and highly effective web software!

But once this was done, we thought: « We don’t want to integrate this on every WordPress site we build! Not that it’s hard, but still, why don’t we create a plugin for this! »

And this is exactly what we did! We built a WordPress plugin which we named WP Highrise Contact. This plugin makes the implementation of a contact form linked to Highrise even more simple:

• Install the plugin
• Configure the options (notification email address, Highrise account name, Highrise API token, etc…)
• Create a page or a post with the content you want and simply drop short code and tada!

You have a contact form, integrated with Highrise, in 1 minute. Feel free to try it on this very site!

Private Beta testers wanted!

The plugin is nearly ready to ship but we would like to have it tested by a few beta testers to ensure it works probably. We are of course very eager to hear any comments you may have on our new plugin.

Should you be interested in testing it, please get in touch with us by filling out, yes, our contact form!