For marketing and web agencies, communication with your clients is paramount. You need to make sure that you’re all on the same page, working with the same goals in mind, and collaborating efficiently from beginning to end. But corresponding with multiple clients across different projects — all at different stages — and providing ongoing support throughout can be a challenge. And if you’re still using email to try and manage it all? Forget challenging, we’re talking impossible. Email wasn’t designed with collaboration in mind, so daily interactions — like dealing with requests, providing project updates, and everything in between — get locked away in personal inboxes, giving the rest of the team zero visibility over who’s working on what. Replies get lost between inboxes, emails go unanswered, and if someone is on vacation or unexpectedly out of office, everything is delayed until they’re back. Teamwork Desk was designed to help you regain control of your inboxes, so you can handle high volumes of emails using our ticketing system with ease and turn your inboxes into collaboration hubs. Here are 6 ways that using a helpdesk tool can help you to streamline your client communications.

With Teamwork Desk, you can create one central hub for all of your agency inboxes — like projects@, support@, accounts@, info@, and sales@. Inboxes, email threads, and client communication history are housed in one place and are accessible to all members of the team. This means that nobody works in a silo and every member of your team has full visibility over where things stand with clients. Even better, you can quickly and easily jump in and progress client correspondence when a teammate is out so clients aren’t left waiting for a reply. Using a helpdesk tool allows you to easily manage client communications as your marketing and web agency grows. It’s designed to make you more efficient at scale so less time is spent trawling through lengthy email threads and you can reclaim that time to provide exceptional service that you’re known for.

All incoming emails are logged as tickets that can be organized within Teamwork Desk so you can easily categorize, prioritize, and track client conversations.  Make your team more responsive by assigning client tickets to their dedicated account manager, or even better, automate the assigning of tickets using triggers (more on that below).  Add an extra layer of info to a ticket at a glance using tags. Create tags like “Website development”, “Advertising campaign” or “Tier 1 support” to give your team context even before reading a ticket, helping them to prioritize work more efficiently.  You can also categorize your incoming client tickets by selecting the ticket types like “Request”, “Problem” or “Question” to organize tickets in a way that works best for your marketing and web agency.  Organize your inbox and give your team an overview of what action is required on a ticket using ticket statuses. Use in-built statuses like “Active”, “Waiting on a customer”, “On-hold” or “Solved” so you can deliver a more effective service. 

When you need to discuss a ticket with your teammates or jump in to provide useful information, you can do this in context by adding an internal note on an email thread. Private notes are only visible to your team and are really helpful when you need to collaborate in context. You can even notify your team about specific notes by using an @mention so they know to follow-up. By adding notes to a ticket you can speed up information sharing behind-the-scenes so that you have everything you need for successful client communication together in one place.  

With Smart Inboxes, you can group messages together based on what’s most important to you and your team. You can create a Smart Inbox based on criteria like “tickets assigned to me”, “tickets I’m following” or “high-priority tickets”, so you can get to what’s important, quicker. Smart Inboxes can be either private to you or shared with the team for others to view. For example, as an account manager, you can set up a Smart Inbox for each of your clients, grouping tickets based on their email domain. You can also group tickets based on tags, such as “Website development” or “Advertising campaign”, for easy access to the tickets you need.  You can set up as many Smart Inboxes as you need based on a multitude of criteria so these are just the tip of the iceberg.

With Teamwork Desk, you can automate your workflow using triggers —  saving you time on repetitive admin tasks that can eat into your productivity.  Remember our example earlier of assigning client tickets to their dedicated account manager? With triggers you can go one step further and automate this step. All you need to do is set up a trigger so that any time an email comes from @customerdomain.com then it’s assigned to their account manager.  There are so many trigger possibilities, like auto-adding tags to tickets, quickly escalating high-priority issues, automatically sending a reminder for follow-up if a ticket has gone unresolved for too many hours or days, and many more.  Another great time saver is the Canned Responses feature. Canned responses are email templates you create that you can then use to respond to frequently asked questions, so you can save time on writing the same reply over and over again but still provide helpful, empathetic responses. 

As they say, no app is an island, and Teamwork Desk is no different. Teamwork Desk integrates seamlessly with the other products in the Teamwork suite – Teamwork, Teamwork Chat, and Teamwork CRM – so you can manage the full customer lifecycle from start to finish. Teamwork and Teamwork Desk are designed to work together so you don’t need to buy third-party connectors, or install, integrate and maintain connections between standalone apps — it’s already part of the package when you use the two apps together.  When a client request comes in through Teamwork Desk, you can create a corresponding Teamwork task directly from the ticket to ensure work keeps moving in the right direction. From there, you can assign the task to the right person, add a due date, set the priority or any other important info the team would need. Then, once the task is marked as complete in Teamwork, it automatically reactivates the ticket in Teamwork Desk so you know it’s time to follow-up with the customer.  > “The integration between Teamwork Desk and Teamwork was the missing link we needed to create a truly efficient process. Instead of wasting time searching for separate solutions to help with project management or customer support, businesses could save a lot of time by going to Teamwork first!” – Raymond Scholl, CISO at Security7 Networks. Not only that, but if there are other products you use as an essential part of your client workflow, it’s easy to integrate them with Teamwork Desk, too. With a full Zapier integration, as well as an open API, connecting Teamwork Desk with the tools you use the most is simple. 

These are just a few of the ways Teamwork Desk can help you to manage client communication and make your team more efficient in the process. Get started with Teamwork Desk today by signing up for a free 30 day trial.