How technology helps developers solve customer communication problems: Sameroom service

In order for an aspiring development studio (digital agency, or another b2b company) to survive, several factors must come together, the most important of which is the streamlined process of communication with customers. And here at this stage very often there are considerable difficulties.

What is the problem

In the “business for business” sphere, it is extremely important to find a balance between the search for new projects and the preservation of the quality of work at the proper level on projects that have already started.
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As a rule, new companies in this field at the beginning of their journey have a small staff of a couple of people and some not very large customers. If things are going well, then your conditional studio will be able to find a large client and successfully complete the project. The earned reputation will quickly start working for a business, and other large organizations will also be interested in the services of your conditional studio.

It would seem that everything is going just fine, but after the first joy of explosive growth passes, the team of your studio will begin to realize that it has fallen into a trap - there is more work, and there are no more working hands. Finding new employees is a long and risky business. Their training will take time and effort. Project managers will need to devote more time not to the projects themselves, but to monitoring the quality of the work. All this leads to the need to work in a very hard mode. Constant stress prevents employees from enjoying work (a common problem in the world of advertising agencies ) and negatively affects the process of project implementation.

Here is the time to take a closer look at the central point of the situation being described - “there is more work”.

Experience shows that a significant part of the additional work after receiving orders from large customers will be a disproportionately increased time devoted to participating in meetings (virtual and full-time) with customers, email correspondence with them, the design of reports, as well as multiple explanations to various customer representatives of various project details.

That is, in fact, in most cases, technically even a small team can successfully conduct several projects at once, but it all depends on the desire of large customers to be constantly in touch - all these emails, documents and meetings take a lot of time and prevent you from doing the real thing.

What to do with appointments and letters

Working with e-mail and meetings takes a lot of time — these are very “expensive” means of communication. It is not surprising that a team under pressure from tight deadlines will by all means shy away from using them. Avoiding communication is a very dangerous way to save time, because the lack of communication with a client negatively affects relations with it. In addition, the constant “reconciliation of hours” with customers helps to achieve exactly the result that the customer needs.

Ultimately, ticks made up of the need for constant communication with the customer on the one hand, and lack of time for them on the other, finally close at the throat of the company - the quality of work (advertising campaigns, mobile applications, etc.) decreases, the mood of employees falls, customers complain.

An interesting point here is that a few years ago, companies from the b2b sphere faced the same problems, but already in their own ** internal ** communications. Tools for team communication (Campfire, Slack, HipChat, Kato, etc.) successfully solved them - just in a couple of years, such services became the de facto standard for intra-office communication. Some IT companies have even completely abandoned email in internal correspondence.

But when dealing with the outside world, the problem remained (and even became less tolerant, because now agency staff have something to compare with).

And if you give the client guest access to the system?

Of course, there are various ways to circumvent the complexity - as a rule, clients are simply given guest access to the internal communication systems of agencies. Using guest access helps alleviate the problem, but is still not the ideal solution.

It often happens that the client does not want to use the studio or agency corporate chat himself and invites his employees to the platform that he uses himself. This is inconvenient, because you need to create new accounts or get used to an unfamiliar software, but whoever pays, he orders music, so it is rather difficult to refuse.



If each new client does the same, then the studio will soon get bogged down with a lot of instant messengers, task managers, video chats and other means of communication. It will take no less time to figure out all this than was once spent on raking up email (but then at least all the information was concentrated in one mailbox).

Another problem - to gather all the right people in one chat is quite difficult. Someone did not notice the invitation (or it fell into spam), or just sabotage the process, or the guest access function imposes a limit on the number of connected users. Ideally, each side of communication (in complex projects with many contractors there can be more than two) should be able to control who can access the discussion from their side.

But the most important obstacle to the effective use of guest access is the question of who owns the messages from the chat history. When using e-mail information belongs to all parties who receive the letter. In the case of corporate communication messengers, everything is different - the team in the rooms of which discussions take place fully possesses all the information, even if it invites representatives of third-party teams and companies as guests.

How to fix it: technology

With the help of the Sameroom.io service (a detailed story about it is presented in the past topic of this blog), development studios, digital agencies and other b2b companies can connect rooms in their chat with rooms in clients' messengers. In this case, it is possible to combine not only the two sides of communication, but also the addition of other participants in the conversation (for example, contractors working on their common project site).

Each side has full control over the access of its employees and the messages in the history, because technically the team of each company is inside their own chat, and the information is sent to the rooms of third-party services via a special “pipe” that Sameroom creates.



Sameroom supports IRC, Gitter, Campfire, Flowdock, Slack, Kato, HipChat and email and forwards messages between them through special pipes.

The main advantage of this approach is that no one needs to use an unfamiliar messenger or other communication tool. In addition, if one of the parties does not use instant messengers in principle, Sameroom allows you to communicate with such clients by email directly from the chat. When using Basecamp, such emails can be used to create updates in a project.

Due to the fact that each party uses its own communication tools, administrators of each company can conduct their own security policy. In addition, each of the parties will have its own copy of all messages sent during the conversation - a very important point in case of possible disputes, claims and proceedings in court (anything can happen).

The founders of new development studios, design workshops or digital agencies think that the main task for them will be to create high-quality products (which will delight customers and the jury of various festivals and competitions).

This is certainly true - but success is simply impossible without properly aligned communications with customers.