How To Create a Client Communication Portal For Your Agency
There are many ways in which client work can be challenging, but one of the most demanding aspects is actually communicating with a client once a project is on the way.
You may find yourself in infinite email threads, numerous phone calls, or a combination of both, which usually leads to awkward miscommunication. A better way would be to streamline your communication and keep everything in one place, so let’s take a look at how Productive can help you with just that.
Inviting Your Clients To Productive
The first step is actually inviting your client to Productive and adding them as a user – and that is completely free of charge. If you’re concerned about privacy (as you rightfully should), rest assured:
- Clients can see only projects that belong to their companies (and not all of them if there are multiple, just the ones they’re invited to)
- Sensitive financial information and worked time are never visible to clients
Improve Your Client Relationships
Share your progress and collaborate on tasks with project stakeholders with Productive.
Sharing Tasks With Clients
When clients have access to the project, they will also see Tasks, and you should decide upfront if you’re okay with that. In some cases, that is useful because they are involved completely in the process of the work, but that could also be a potential blocker for some agencies, as they don’t want to involve the client in every single aspect of the work.
To be clear, in Productive, you really don’t have to choose between one or the other. Here’s how you can set it up:
- Create a dedicated Task board (or a list) that clients can see – use this for discussion and for gathering feedback
- Other Tasks should be private; this means that only people who are manually added to each Task can see them
Clients can comment on Tasks, add attachments and use threaded comments for discussing the work – perfect for keeping everything in one place.
🔥 Hot Tip: You can hide comments from clients if you want to – just select that option before writing a comment or edit an existing one to make it visible only to your teammates.
Dedicated Client Docs
A good option is also to use Docs, where you can use advanced sharing options finely tune who will have access to it. Next, you can create a collaborative Doc where your client will be given a summary of what was done and what is coming up next.
Because Docs are so versatile, you can literally make up your own format:
- Use comments to highlight changes
- Mention relevant people to quickly get their attention, and mention specific Tasks
- Add images, rich text, and multiple pages for more depth
Create a Live Ticker With Dashboards
You can also create a custom Dashboard that will update in real time and show meaningful information like billable time, closed Tasks or total expenses. Again, clients will see only the data normally visible to them so there is no risk of showing something you didn’t want to share.
Got questions about this article, or are you looking for a specific use case? Feel free to reach out to us via the in-app chat or via email.
Improve Your Client Relationships
Share your progress and collaborate on tasks with project stakeholders with Productive.
