Inviting clients into your space
How we’re using chat to connect with our clients and create more natural interactions
We’ve been using some form of intra-office chat for some time over at Upstatement. We’re not a distributed company either, we’re a brick-and-mortar design studio in Boston. We like it that way. We can get big sheets of paper out and sketch on them, we can sit together and work, we can go to lunch.
The physical office we work in is important to us for another reason. It’s representative of our culture and attitude, from the artwork to the spaces and the bookshelves. It’s an inspiring place where you can get a ton of good work done, learn a bunch about something, or play nintendo with your friends. All these functions are integral to what it means to be at Upstatement as a client or an employee.
When people come to our office, they’re stepping into a world we created for ourselves. Think about having people over to your home or office. It’s fun to share your space with people, and by doing so share a bit of your personal culture.
Jeff introduced us to HipChat a couple of years ago, and everyone instantly loved it. It was a great way to promote interoffice banter and fun without turning the studio into a break room (an open office plan, but that’s another story). We used it for some work, but it was mostly for gifs and links and youtube stuff. But it served its purpose and gave us a digital watering hole, a gathering place. A spot where we could kick it.
Then Slack came along. Pete was the first to try it and suggest we move to it. Slack seemed to crack the problem of how we could use something like this for real, meaningful work and communication. From rooms dedicated to projects (#client-bostonglobe) or topics (#css-standards, #game-of-thrones), this was a game changer. Add in webhooks and integrations, and this place became as important to our culture as the office we work in.
Yes, it posts to Slack.
As this digital space became more and more a part of our culture, we wanted to find a way to invite clients into this as well. We have a pretty transparent client interaction style at Upstatement; we do daily calls and checkins with our clients, and form our interactions more as collaborations than turn-based volleys. We’ve found it helps us work together towards a shared goal. We want our clients to own the work as much as we do.
So for the past month we’ve opened up our project channels to a couple client teams that are in the early stages of their projects. So far the experience has been great, and we’re able to share work and ideas on a much shorter time scale than even with a daily call. We can just pop into the channel and ask a question, or leave a sketch or diagram of an idea. This has also led to more discussion like interactions.
Our clients like coming over to our office because they can get out of their usual place and go engage in the work and be in a totally new environment. Especially for some clients that work in a newsroom or a cubicled office space, coming over to our studio with its large windows, comfy meeting places and fun atmosphere can be a real break.
I’m hoping that’s something we can provide with Slack as well. Even if the team on our side is not working remotely, by nature of teaming up with a client we’ve created a distributed team. If we can create a natural place to interact and inject with our culture of thinking, discussion, debate and humor, we can have a place to bond and share info and ideas naturally.
We’ll let you know how it goes, and if you find yourself in Boston, swing on by. I’ll book some time on the NES.
