Elevating Client Communication: Advanced Messaging Solutions with Slack

Embark on a journey from chaos to clarity with me, Karalee, as I recount the tale of how I tamed the wild beast of client communication in our latest Neurodivergent Bytes episode. Witness the transformation from a jumbled mess of Facebook DMs to the sleek, organized corridors of Slack, and how this shift revolutionized not only my workflow but also amplified client satisfaction. Along the way, I'll share actionable insights into identifying and addressing communication bottlenecks, moving from the simplicity of Telegram to the robust capabilities of Slack that catered to the unique needs of my business.

Get ready to unlock the secrets of efficient client communication as I dissect the features of Slack that turned skeptics into believers. We'll explore voice messages with transcripts, customizable channels, and all-in-one communication - tools that could be game-changers for your operations too. If you're pondering a new approach to connect with clients or refine your business processes, this episode is bursting with practical advice. And for those who feel the weight of overwhelm, I extend an invite to collaborate on a personalized systems game plan with VIP support to ensure your path to success is as smooth as possible. Don't miss out on this episode filled with revelations and tips that might just revolutionize the way you work.

Grab your VIP Week here: theproductivityimpact.com/vip-week

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Transcript

Karalee: 0:51

Hello, hello, amazing humans, welcome back to Neurodivergent Bytes. I am your host, Karalee, and today we're going to be talking about my favorite way to communicate with other business owners this is particularly my clients. Okay, so we're going to be talking about my clients, what my favorite software is, and how this software specifically has helped me be able to really communicate with my clients in a really streamlined way. So communicating with your clients, especially if you're a service provider, is absolutely essential for you to do your job and have amazing client care. We all want to do a great job and we all want to have our clients feel loved and cared for and that they are a top priority, and so the definition here of communication is the means of sending or receiving information. So what does that actually look like for you? So that's your first action step. What does your current communication emphasis on this part, current look like right now? Okay, so if you want to pause this, write this down, go ahead, otherwise I'm going to jump right on in. So that was your first action step. So what does your current communication look like for you? So let's jump right in and talk about what I do personally for client communication. So we're gonna go back about six months here.

Karalee: 2:16

I found this bottleneck about six months ago. Okay, so I was communicating with clients mostly in Facebook DMs and let me tell you that was a total disaster. I was scrolling through countless DMs to find one piece of information I didn't realize I needed in the beginning to document Okay, who has been there? Well, you're trying to find the information because you know you have it and you don't want to bug your client because you know that you have it and they know that you have it, right. So that was just not working for me. Something needed to change and that's when I started researching in different communication platforms. Right, because I'm like, okay, this is going, this is a bottleneck already. I am spending countless times in the DM. In the DM is just trying to find what I need in order to do something for this client, right? So I started researching these platforms and I was like, okay, you know, asking different people what they use, what they loved about it, different things like that.

Karalee: 3:16

So I tried out Telegram, because it seemed pretty simple to me and it took it out of Facebook DMs at the very least. So it was 100% work related stuff that we went in there and then more like friend or whatever stuff was in Facebook DMs right, we needed to have a separation, because a lot of times what happens is that we come, we could become friends or you know at least very close acquaintances, and so we talk to each other in the DMs right, it's not always business. We want to know what's going on in our clients lives too, so it's kind of easy to easier to separate. But it Telegram didn't actually work how I had hoped. It worked a little bit better. It did use a separation piece, but it didn't quite work how I was hoping it to, because I was still going through Telegram's DMs trying to find what I needed for these clients. So we were partially there. It fixed one of the problems that was a bottleneck, but it wasn't fixing the whole process, right. And so in bottlenecks right, bottlenecks are when things slow down significantly in your business, especially your business operations alright, so then what happened next.

Karalee: 4:26

Here is, I became an executive assistant for a CEO and she used Slack to run everything and I saw how it worked and I was sold. Okay, so I switched all of my clients to Slack. Now I'm gonna explain here, because I know some of you hate Slack. I have heard it. I tell some clients or some people I'm talking with there I'm like, yeah, we're gonna put you on Slack so that way we can communicate, and they're like hate Slack. I mean, you can't please everyone and you know that's the point of having multiple options.

Karalee: 4:54

But, honestly, all the clients that I have moved to Slack that said that they hated it actually like, okay, I kind of like this, but a lot of times we just don't understand what a software can do for us until we break it down. Right, we look at the features, we look at how it will work best for us and, of course, I have an operations mind. So I'm seeing all of these things laid out right in front of me and could put the pieces together very easily. That might not be the case for you, and that's totally fine. You might be amazing at supporting people with weight loss or with meal planning or I don't even know. That's just coming off the top of my head, right. Whatever your specialty is, that I am not good at, but I'm good at this part, right. That's why we are all amazing at our own things. That's why we all have different businesses, right. That's why we also have multiple options for different ways to do things. That's why there's not a one-size-fits-all sort of software in any respect.

Karalee: 5:50

Okay, so the top three things, though, that I love about Slack and number three is my favorite here is number one is the easy voice messages with a transcript included. So Telegram could do voice messages but there was no transcript. What would happen is I would read the message, but I couldn't listen to the message, I should say, and so I couldn't read a transcript because there wasn't one, and then I would forget about the message. All right, so that's not helpful for me, right? Because I would then forget to go back to it. So now we have the easy voice messages with the transcript included. So even if I can't listen to the voice message, I can still understand what is happening in that voice message without ever clicking play, right. So that was the first thing that I was like okay, this is really cool.

Karalee: 6:36

So number two was as client channels and team channels that can be custom to what is needed, right? So, depending on the size of your business, you can have different team channels for different things, right? Like we could have an operations channel. You could have, like, a certain offer channel. You could have just a team channel, a generic one, right? So there's different ways to have team channels right in there, so you can kind of keep things more streamlined and on topic and not all over the place, right? And then you also have client channels Right With me. I have a team channel with my virtual assistant and I have client channels with every single person, and this is also easy to add in a team member to any of these channels if they're going to be working on any of the work. So that's already a super easy addition without even changing anything, right. So, being able to have client channels, team channels, add your team into your client channels as needed game changer, okay.

Karalee: 7:34

So number three, which I said was my favorite, is the save for later button. Okay, this now solves number one and even helps with number two. Right, save for later button. It keeps the things that you need to go back to by essentially bookmarking them and even set reminders to go back later on. Okay, when I just said in the voice messages, right, I wouldn't remember to go back to it because it would never remind me or I couldn't like save it, and then that message would get lost in a sea of other messages as we keep going. So essentially, what I do is I go in and I've bookmarked things to go back to later, and sometimes I even set reminders if it's really important, but I need to take care of it at like 3 pm and it's 9, it's 9 am, right, then I can set that reminder to remind me at 3 pm that I need to go back and actually look at that, which, okay. So these things have transformed the way I do client communication.

Karalee: 8:26

Okay, and the first way that this has transformed the way I do client communication is it's allowed me to keep things in one place, right, there's a lot of things all inside Slack and I could go more in details, but you can add apps and all those other things too, but that's not the point here. And, by the way, all those things also get put into ClickUp where they're needed, just not right away. So I can adhere to my boundaries, okay, so someone can send me a Slack message at 7 pm and I might look at it, right, but I can actually mark it for save for later so I can go back to it in the morning, even create me to be one of those reminders to then remember to put whatever that was needed, that needed to go in to click up, in, to click up later on, so I can adhere to my boundaries by a quick you know save for later, instead of having to stop right then go put it in, click up, do all those things for fear that I would forget something. Okay, so I'm utilizing this software with its features to help me adhere to my boundaries, which is very helpful, right? We all want to do that. As business owners that love what they do. That can be very tricky sometimes.

Karalee: 9:34

All right, so the second thing that has transformed the way I do client communication is it streamlines all of my communication from my clients. It all goes through Slack. Okay, there's no question for my clients how they communicate with me. All right, this also allows my email inbox, because a lot of people be like well, I can just, you know, talk to you in email if the EMS aren't good, right, but then it would overflow my email inbox. So it stays clear there. But I also do all my client things to get lost in my email inbox, because my email inbox is not super clean. We implement labels and tags and all those things, right, but it's not super clean, so I don't want a client request or a client communication to get lost in a sea of emails or get lost in an email thread because it's not as simple as it is in Slack or even the DMs to see the thread Like it is right. It's different in email. So email is not a streamlined way for me to communicate with clients period. So Slack is a nice alternative to that. This still keeps things all together and all the communication is in one place, right. In.

Karalee: 10:42

The third way that using Slack has transformed the way I do client communication is when you really just need to talk through something okay, and a Zoom meeting isn't really feasible for whatever reason. It's simple and it's simple to just do a voice message in there and you don't absolutely need to listen to it because there's a transcript, right. I kind of touched on that already when I was telling you which features about Slack that I love, and it's really that has been very, very helpful for me to be able to have that transcript, kind of like when you have reels and you love it, when they have captions or when it just allows you to not have to press play on it to where you know there's sound, but to be able to still get the feel of the message, for whatever reason. Right, and so those are the three things that have absolutely transformed the way I do client communication. I mean, there's plenty more, but I wanted to highlight those three today. So I want you to actually start thinking about the issues that you're having with your client communication today. Right, what does the current client communication look like for you? Okay, I want you to jot all of those things down Now. I also want you to think would Slack solve any of those? Right, I'm not saying that you absolutely have to have Slack. There are plenty of alternatives out there. I just found that Slack has really been helpful for me and you know maybe some of these reasons, it will be helpful for you. Okay, and if you're curious about any of these other features that Slack has because I highlighted, like, maybe four or five, you know, within the three, but I highlighted only a few of the features go check out Slack. Okay, and even to make this even more convenient, I headed the show notes and I actually just put the Slack URL in there for you to easily get it, okay, so, whether you decide to give Slack a try or not, right, I am not necessarily promoting Slack here anyway. Just this is the software that has helped me be able to streamline things a lot.

Karalee: 12:37

All right, so whether you're using Slack or not, your action step this week is to decide on what software you're going to use for client communication. Okay, decide. If you want to give Slack a try, go ahead. And I want you to actually try it out this week. If you have a real close client, you're like hey, I'm trying to streamline some communication. I'd love to add you on Slack, for example, would you be open to that? And some people would be like oh yeah, absolutely. Or you can tell them why you want to move to Slack, and they would even be willing to try it out for you. And you're like and if things don't work out, you know we can always go back to the form that we were doing before, but if this is a big bottleneck of yours client communication, you're gonna have to not go back to the way you were doing it before and try a different way, okay, so, as with myself, though, the first thing I tried didn't work how I wanted it to right, did not work how I imagined it, and so and that was Telegram right, it did give me a step closer, but I kept going until I figured out what worked really well for myself, okay, and that ended up being Slack for communications.

Karalee: 13:44

So you might be thinking, okay, this is just one piece of the puzzle, carolee, like there's so many more bottlenecks or things that I need to like, deal with in my business and find solutions for, or streamlined. Okay, I'm not gonna leave you hanging. There are next steps. And if you want to get your own systems game plan in place, right, this is what I call this. When we start really streamlining operations, you start with a systems game plan right, the foundational pieces and we figure out what foundational pieces don't need to be put into place and we really work on refining those foundational pieces. And then we start streamlining things from there and adding as we scale and grow and really figure out what we need to do there. So the best thing for you to do to definitely get some one-on-one support for me as well, because this is a unique process and when you have an operation specialist in your back pocket, it makes it go a lot faster you can grab a VIP week, okay. We literally create this entire systems game plan for you. We completely map it out and then we actually get to work on the most vital pieces that very week, okay. So, yes, in five days.

Karalee: 14:56

If you're stressed and overwhelmed about these things, you're like I don't have a plan, right, you can go from. In five days. You can go from stressed and overwhelmed to actually having a plan of action with a timeline for implementation, complete with 30 days of Slack access. Right, so you can even try out Slack with me, right, 30 days of Slack access to keep you on track, okay, and then answer any of your questions, give you any feedback, right, about your system's game plan and the implementation all along the way. So, essentially, you have access to me for 30 days and then the first five days we are gonna have this entire system's game plan mapped out and already start to implement it. Right, to really get you feeling much more communicating with your clients easier.

Karalee: 15:43

You know, maybe having that task management system set up, maybe having a social media plan, right, like, what are those? What's the system behind what? I'm gonna be doing different things like that. Those are some examples of some systems, but we're going to cover, you know, the five core systems and you can go ahead and head to the VIP week page to actually grab what those are, what some of those examples are, and you can do that by heading to theproductivityimpactcom forward slash VIP dash week to learn more. So if you have any questions about this, you can head to that page, or you can head to IG and go ahead and send me a DM with any of your questions, okay, so I look forward to having either a VIP week with you or really seeing if Slack might be a great communication tool for you. So I would love to hear from you though. All right, let me know how you're doing, let me know what you're doing, let me know if you love or hate Slack and why. I'm totally down for it. Okay, all right. Bye for now.