Today I learned about a few new workflow ideas to improve communication with clients. Being the technologists that we are, the value of modern communication tools like Slack is very clear. Many clients or business partners, however, may not be interested in learning a brand new tool or workflow.
Slack is a powerful asynchronous communication tool that allows teams to communicate efficiently without interrupting each other’s focus. It is like text messaging when communicating directly with another team member. It can also be used like a group text or chatroom when communicating with a relevant team or micro-team.
Email is still king in the sense that it is so ubiquitous. Almost everyone is comfortable with email these days. The problem with email is that it is easy for messages to get lost in the noise. Communication with a group of people or carrying on a long thread of messages can get messy.
If 3-5 team members are CC’d in an email to a client, and they respond with Reply, instead of Reply-All the rest of the team is left out of the conversation.
If a team member sends a question to the client and forgets to CC everyone, communication also breaks down.
I found a few potential solutions to this communication conundrum. So that client emails are made visible to the team, Slack provides for the creation of a “Channel Email Address”. This can be shared with the client as THE email to use with the team.
What if the client still emails an individual instead of the Channel Email Address? No problem, just setup a Gmail filter to auto forward messages from a particular person to your special email address.
Awesome, so we have the ability to capture incoming emails in slack. What about sending messages to said person’s email?
I found a solution for that too.
There is a service by the name of mailclark.ai that allows you to setup a Slack email channel that will forward messages communicated in slack to the desired email address(s).