It's a well-known fact, that content is king and the client's opinion is always a priority. In order to satisfy the client's expectations and deliver an awesome final product, communication is the key.
Obviously, these would depend on whether or not the client is local or remote, the specifics and the scale of the project, and so on, but what is your preferred approach to sourcing the information from the client before and during the project?
Do you organize on-site meetings, have discussions, where you take some notes, present some ideas, sketches right away?
Do you use some online collaboration tools and let the client put down some ideas, where you can add comments, ask for precisions?
Do you prefer to use some communication channels like Slack to organize more real-time discussion and ask info right away if the necessity arises?
Or do you have some other communication workflows you have discovered to work best and would love to share with us?
Top comments (13)
We work on a lot of SaaS projects where management and communication is something which is really important. What we usually do is after the contract is signed we make a project specific Notion workspace for the client where they can track all the tasks which are documented all the time by our team. Sure, the workspace gets too much techy for the client to understand so to mitigate that we have a card there called “Reports and Logs”. Every Friday (one specific day in a week) we add all the tasks we worked in a week till Friday for our client so all he cares is that particular card in our workspace.
Rest for the daily communication and quick questions with the client or coworkers we have specific slack channels. I think it’s really unprofessional and unproductive if you do meeting every day with a client so what we do instead is we pick a particular day after verifying with the client and on that day we do meeting to show what we achieved so far in the project and work on the feedback which is given. Not just this, every Monday I do meeting with the team and we plan weekly agenda and share that with our client. So it’s like Notion workspace to track tasks, slack for communication, 1 meeting every Friday and weekly goals are shared over slack every Monday.
Seems like a well-thought-out and organized workflow.
Notion is awesome, and it's hard to think of smth you can't do with it when it comes to taking notes and organizing stuff. Slack is a must, especially for teams. 💯
Thanks for the insight 🔥🔥
Notion saved us a lot and now it became part of our core business, we have SOPs, Wikis, Guides, Marketing Calendar and all sorts of things on Notion. Not just that our team voted to use this product.
What type of workflow you follow if you don't mind to share?
I've mainly worked with local clients and have tried to organize on-sites and calls as I believe it's the most effective way 😉
If that's not possible - I would go with smth like Notion/Evernote/Trello. 😉
Hi Madza,
For client work I rely on a combination of video calls, email, and project management tools. All my client work is tracked in Asana, so any project updates or new tasks are all tracked there for easy reference. I will also send the client a weekly update email via Asana; I have one weekly meeting, and any additional questions will go through email. I have a policy of not joining client Slack workspaces since they tend to be way too distracting and hard to manage and they set up the expectation of ASAP communication. It’s worked well for me thus far!
Never worked with Asana, tho I could imagine clients must love it cause they can track the project's timeline basically. I could also imagine what dealing with like 50 clients simultaneously in Slack would feel like in a daily basis 😃😃
1 Google Doc. 1 shared folder for files. No emails allowed after the first meeting. (internally we might use a trello board - but the client doesn't get to see it)
The client pays us to get them to their goal. We'll communicate with them in our research phases - and then in person (zoom) to sell our design choices at a few stages - but in general, they don't need to be involved. They are paying us to be the experts - and get it done. This industry is way too much about Ego and people pleasing - and not nearly enough about good design and goal-driven design. We've used base-camp and things like that in the past / but it just creates more work. Google Drive - all the way.
Google Drive offers intuitive, easy to understand, client-oriented workspace. 👍
I could surely see using it with client, especially for sourcing media from client (images, video) and, as you say, Google Docs for text 😉📚
The key - is to force them to properly install Drive locally on their computer - so they can just drag files in.
They also usually have an AHA! moment... and we end up doing some IT for the client. For example, this woman who owned a string of Concert halls had a different computer at each venue - and another at home / and would drive to where she needed if she needed some document. After building her a new website - she started to understand Drive (the cloud) - and so now all her computers have the same data on them. Now she doesn't need to drive across town to look at an out of date Word document. WIN!
Fair enough! 👍
Agree with this 💯
Client should be regularly updated on what's been done, the current status and the future plans relative to the project 😉
I would use email.
Do you have an experience on dealing with multiple clients simultaneously?
What email client do you use? Any tips on sorting/managing the emails? 👀