Tech Resources Part 3: Keeping Connected
Final Round: Keeping Connected
Communicate in Style
Whether it’s clients or colleagues, you’ll need a reliable way to communicate, and there are so many options out there, you could spend each day of the year using something new.
We recommend finding several ways that you’re comfortable communicating with, as different business interactions may require different forms of communication.
Your clients will also have individual preferences, and this is where things like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software start to be a consideration. Don’t worry about that, we’ll tackle CRM at the end of this post!
G Suite
I know what you’re thinking, “Really, you’re going to tell me about Gmail?!”
No, I’m going to tell you about the wonders of getting your business email and having it be “[email protected]”
Setting up a domain, or even just setting up a dedicated email for business contacts, adds professionalism to your work and communication. This is good for your current clients and helps you look clean and dedicated to interested parties.
G Suite will provide your company with its own google drive space, giving you a nice place to exchange information without worrying about compatibility between word processing software. Since Google documents contains spreadsheets, it allows you to export CSV files into easily accessible documents for your entire business.
Having a business account also provides you with some important separation of work and personal life.
Pricing
Slack
An instant messaging service designed for the workplace. It offers a free service and a per user service, the latter offering conference calls, more storage, and secure exports.
You can customize channels and user access, so only relevant people can see all conversations. What’s more, Slack will archive your conversations and allow you to search them for key information.
It’s a great tool for remote work and growing offices, especially when you can’t have everyone at all meetings all of the time.
As a bonus, Slack includes a lot of fun emotes and allows for custom uploads of your own in-office jokes or symbols!
Discord
Discord comes to us with a background specifically tailored as voice communication for multiplayer games, but that doesn’t discount how useful it may be to you. Servers are free, although you can pay for more customization, support, and of course, emotes. You can belong to an unlimited number of servers.
You can download it to your pc or run it in a browser, and the phone application is free, too.
Discord’s great draw is that ability to create multiple custom-access chat and voice channels for communication. They’re currently working on video chat and screen sharing as well.
While you can share photos and documents readily with a large group of people, Discord is not made to be a document sharing application application. If you’re looking for that, please take a look <<HERE>link to Tech Resources blog>. If you want to take a look at Discord yourself, you can see what they have to offer here:
Zoom
Zoom is a well-designed video/web conferencing service that makes remote meetings a snap. The application allows for the host to send a link or phone number to their participants, easily allowing people to join the conference. Additionally, zoom allows for people to view the meeting even if they are not participating, an ideal setup for training or webinars.
Services are available for free, and continually add more features and number of participants as the pricing goes up. Their pricing tiers are variable depending on your needs.
Outside of meetings, Zoom is a good way to work with other people when you’re remote, as you can share screens while talking, and record your calls.
Did we mention that Zoom will integrate itself with your calender, allowing you to schedule meetings with people from their, meeting link included? We did now, and it’s awesome! You can see more detail about it here:
CRM Software
CRM software is not necessary, but it can be useful. We’ll try to provide a basic rundown of it here so you can decide if it’s something that may provide value to you and your business.
CRM is, in its most basic form, a very fancy contact list. It will store all of your clients and their information, with notes, special practices, and allow you to assign tasks related to clients to yourself or other employees.
Disclaimer This article presents general information and is not intended to be tax or legal advice. Refer to IRS publications and discuss possible tax deductions with your tax preparer.
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