That last episode in the solopreneurial journey of Chloe sure was hectic. She was tackling one of the most complex parts of her business, which is taking care of her customers. She used Zoho Desk and Jira to manage her customer queries—Zoho Desk as a means of letting customers get in touch with her, and Jira to assign tickets to the support technician working for Chloe.
It helped a lot that Chloe uses Zoho Mail, and it had ready integrations with those applications. This meant that she had access to important customer and ticket information readily available to her in her email inbox.
Chloe strives for perfection in her marketing agency. To ensure that she provides high-quality results for her clients, she hires freelancers who are highly skilled in a particular area. They can help her with tasks that fall outside her scope of expertise.
Now she needs to keep all of the freelancers on the same page as she is. To do this, she needs strong systems in place to ensure smooth communication and prevent any important information from getting lost in transit.
Slack is her tool of choice for her instant messaging needs. She uses this for most of her communication with freelancers.
In Slack, she has different channels for different departments. For example, she has a separate channel for design-related talks, another channel for general discussions, and a separate channel for all of the new things that are in the pipeline.
Slack channels help her stay organized with all of the different things that are going on in her agency. It gives her a sense of clarity by keeping all of her important conversations categorized cohesively.
She can take this further with the Slack integration for Zoho Mail. With this integration, she can bring her emails into her Slack channels and even reply to emails without leaving Slack.
Chloe wants her website to be revamped with a contemporary design and add customer testimonials to boost confidence and increase sales. So she sends a design request email to her lead designer.
Because she has configured the Slack integration in a way that forwards any email sent with the subject line "Design" to her design channel, other freelance designers in that channel can also see the contents of this email.
This fosters a culture of transparency and open communication within her freelancer community. They can discuss design-related ideas, gather feedback, and collaborate without compromise. This also spares Chloe from the need to send emails to everyone individually, inevitably missing some people.
After everyone has discussed the design for her website revamp based on the requirements in the email, the lead designer can reply to her email from inside Slack. This added convenience and the time it saves from context switching can add up over time to be a significant difference.
Different people coming together to collaborate will evolve beyond description. It will also involve file sharing and working together on those files. Let's see how Chloe manages file management and collaboration efficiently in the next episode.
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