Whether you are working on a large-scale or small-scale project, all your effort will fall flat unless you nurture your client communication. After all, the outcome of your project heavily depends on your client’s feedback.
Keeping a good communication flow with your client will not only help you deliver positive results, but will also help you build trust and develop long-lasting relationships and collaboration on many projects to come.
The ideal way to communicate with your client and overcome any issues that may arise during the project development is in person. By organizing weekly or monthly meetings, you will keep both your team and the client in the loop and bridge any gaps in communication. However, due to the heavy workload and multiple tasks you need to juggle, organizing meetings can be time-consuming. That is why you need to invest in the right set of collaboration tools that will improve your client communication and keep all the data in one place.
Here, we’ve rounded up a few collaboration tools that every ambitious business owner should have in their toolkit.
Slack
Slack is an excellent collaboration tool that helps you bring all the communication together and allows you and your clients to organize your communication and access it with just a few clicks. It allows you to keep in touch with your clients at any time regardless of where your clients are located. It enables you to create channels and invite particular members of the team or the client and discuss particular issues relevant to that specific group of people. Slack integrates with almost any enterprise and makes you work faster. If you are looking for the most efficient way to run a business with your clients, invest in Slack, and you will see positive results no time.
ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab is a powerful project management tool that enables your team to juggle multiple projects easily and stay within desired timelines and budgets. ActiveCollab will keep your team coordinated and regularly updated about any changes to the project. It combines time-tracking, task management, and billing into one easy-to-use app and improves your team’s workflow.
The best part is that it allows you to involve your clients and make them one of the players. In this way, your clients have a clear overview of all the things you and your team are working on at the moment. Also, they can leave their feedback directly to the task and keep track of any updates. To get a real insight into the real performance of ActiveCollab tool, you can conduct a project management tools comparison and see if it will work for you.
Hipchat
Hipchat is a communication platform that makes your client communication faster and more efficient. It can be integrated with all leading business apps and it comes with many features, including a group and private chat, file sharing, video calling, and screen sharing. It allows you to create different rooms when working with clients, in which you can discuss particular issues and avoid any misunderstandings. Rooms are open for anyone to join in or restricted to invite-only.
Invision
Invision is a tool specifically developed for designers. It enables your team to facilitate design discussions asynchronously, track feedback from both your team and clients, and interact with anyone effortlessly. With Invision you can manage your projects with a single dashboard and integrate with different platforms to create seamless design environments. You can easily share interactive prototypes with your clients and help them understand the look and feel of the design before the final stage.
Dropbox
Dropbox is one of the most popular pieces of storage and collaboration software; it gives you the ability to organize your documents and files with minimum effort. With Dropbox, you can easily share large files and even entire videos with your clients in a few easy steps. On top of that, Dropbox allows you and your client to edit any presentation on the spot without emailing files back and forth. Both your clients and your team get automatically updated about any changes or modifications to the project. Finally, with Dropbox you no longer have to worry about losing a file – your photos, videos, and files are neatly organized and safe.
Author:
Rachel is currently working as the vice president of communications at ActiveCollab. After finishing her master’s degree in Communications she pursued a career in the digital industry, most notably in marketing and public relations.
