How Teamwork Spaces brought YOUNITY's team and clients closer together
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YOUNITY is an IT consultancy that specializes in ahead-of-the-curve digital marketing solutions. The consultancy’s strong team helps clients including Migros, Swica and the Swiss national post service to implement technologies such as marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM) and headless content technology. The YOUNITY team works remotely from around Zürich.
Everything was in Teamwork – except project content
Teamwork has been the platform for all of YOUNITY's client work and internal projects since 2015. In the words of YOUNITY Co-founder, Mario J. Kotschner, “We do everything in Teamwork.”
Mario and his team have taken full advantage of Teamwork’s features, as well as our other products and integrations. For instance, they’ve used Teamwork Desk to manage support tickets more effectively, and they’ve implemented our time-tracking feature to make billing for client work more efficient and transparent.
But there’s one crucial component of YOUNITY's work that Teamwork wasn’t involved with until recently: project content collaboration. Younity had been creating and managing project documents using a developer-oriented solution called GitBook, which had an unfortunate tendency to get in the way of the team’s work and its collaboration with clients.
"We were at a point with GitBook where it was getting more expensive, and it was lacking some key features from a project management perspective,” says Mario.
“I identified that Teamwork’s new version of Spaces would be easier for us to work with, and after some test runs, we decided to migrate.”
“Now we have this one source to go to, we can find things faster”
Teamwork Spaces is a knowledge base solution. It combines core capabilities like document creation and asset management with some unique content collaboration innovations, including a required reading functionality, and interactive widgets that can add features such as task lists to a live document.
For YOUNITY, one of the core benefits of Spaces has been centralizing the content for each project within a single workspace.
“Honestly, it’s really helped with our productivity,” says Mario.
“Now we have this one source to go to rather than multiple sources, we can find the things we need much faster.”
Each YOUNITY client has their own space within Teamwork Spaces. This gives them access to their own secure workspace, where project documentation can be stored and reviewed in real-time.
The dedicated spaces mean that whenever YOUNITY's team members need to find a certain item, they’ll know exactly where to look.
“Even if one of our team is off work for a week or something, they will be able to find everything they need to refer to within that area,” says Mario.
“They can say “Okay, it’s a topic about that customer, so I’ll look in their space,” and straight away they’ll be in the world of that customer or project.”
Teamwork Spaces: an ideal solution for working with clients
Not only has Teamwork Spaces helped YOUNITY to manage its project content more efficiently; according to Mario, it has also enabled smoother collaboration between the consultancy and its clients.
“Most businesses out there which don’t work in IT will find a platform like GitBook too complex to use, especially during coronavirus times when we are not able to coach them in-person,” Mario explains.
“Our clients are normal business people who need a solution that’s as easy to use as possible, and that’s what Teamwork Spaces has given us. It’s very easy for our customers to work with.”
Perhaps the most valuable Spaces feature in terms of client collaboration, is the capability for clients to comment on project content in real-time.
“With Spaces, what really caught our attention is how easy it was for ourselves and our clients to comment on a document and discuss it, just like we would with a normal PDF on our laptops,” says Mario.
“You can immediately see who changed what, and that’s exactly what we need in order to collaborate on documents with our clients.”
Another make-or-break aspect of client collaboration for YOUNITY is the method of sharing content. Whereas many solutions require the client to log-in in order to access content, Teamwork Spaces lets YOUNITY share content with its clients via a unique link.
“We’re very thankful that it’s possible to create a shareable link, because clients often don’t want to log in somewhere, but I want to have that information in our system rather than writing it somewhere else,” says Mario.
“With the shareable links in Spaces, you can just send it to the client and say “Hey, there’s all your information.”
Teamwork Spaces also plays an important role at the conclusion of YOUNITY's projects, when the time comes to report to the client.
“We hand out Teamwork Spaces pages at the end of a project or job, to show results, charts, our analysis of the work and details of work-in-progress,” says Mario.
Better collaborations through easy access and client-friendly design
Overall, Teamwork Spaces has given YOUNITY a better way to collaborate closely with its clients.
Having a single workspace for each client has made it easier to locate project content, even for team members who haven’t been working on the relevant project for a little while.
Perhaps even more importantly, the user-friendly design of Teamwork Spaces has helped YOUNITY's clients use the platform to the full, from updating content with real-time comments to accessing documents via shareable links.
These positives from both the consultancy-side and the client-side have convinced Mario to move all of YOUNITY's digital work to Spaces.
“Every time you write something, you just go directly in there,” says Mario.
“It just makes sense to work together in that one document, and not separately elsewhere.”
“Everything about Teamwork Spaces is great. It’s a very easy solution for us, and it’s very easy and well made for our customers too.”
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