5 Apps Crucial to Internal Communication at LAWgical

We’re a small team here at LAWgical– and we’re spread all over the country. With 16 of us in Denver, another 4 in Los Angeles, and the rest sprinkled elsewhere in the US and abroad, it can be tough to stay in touch. Luckily for us, there are a number of great tech solutions that make long-distance (or even intra-office) communication a cinch. Here are five cloud-based tools/applications that are crucial to the LAWgical team:

1. Campfire (37signals)

We’ve always been fairly reliant on interoffice IM as a company, but as our teams became more and more spread out, it became clear that person-to-person IM wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Enter Campfire, a group chat app that has consolidated and streamlined communication for us. Here’s what our lobby looks like:

You can see that we have a room for each department so that teams can stay in touch with each other throughout the day. Our daily stand-up meeting takes place in our respective chat rooms as opposed to in-person, and team members can check in on other departments by reading through the day’s chat history. Notice that we also have a WaterBeer Cooler room for the whole company. People drop in there to share announcements relevant to the whole team, personal news, and even the occasional Friday funny. At about $1.00 per month per allowed chatter, the pricing is fairly reasonable.

2. Google Drive

LAWgical would not be where we are today were it not for the advent of Google Drive (formerly known as Docs). With its collaborative office suite, Google has enabled even the most disparate of teams to work together like they’re in the same room. We leverage almost every feature that Drive has to offer, from the Sales team using Docs to work on proposals, to Marketing building customer surveys in Forms. Plus, our dependence on Google Drive has saved the company a couple bucks on expensive Microsoft Office licenses; win-win for all.

3. ToutApp

We look through absolutely every email sent our way and– as you can imagine– we get quite a few repeat questions coming in through our various channels. This problem’s solution has always been to have a standard set of replies for scenarios that often crop up. Since we’ve implemented ToutApp though, LAWgical has been able to take canned responses to a whole new level.

ToutApp is a productivity tool for everyday business emails. Because of Tout, we’ve saved countless man hours spent writing emails. Its tracking system lets us see the number of views and link clicks any one email has received, giving us unique insight into what happens to our messages after we’ve sent them. Tout has also streamlined our sales process. By allowing us to create email templates, we waste no time copying and pasting the same reply. While everyone can have their own personal set of templates, team sharing ensures that all of our Marketing Consultants are sending out the uniform emails at key points in the sales process. This additionally permits us to A/B test different styles and verbage for efficacy.

Tout integrates seamlessly with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook and supports a number of high-profile CRMs like Salesforce, HighRise and SugarCRM. These integrations combined with browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox make Tout incredibly easy and convenient to use.

While it’s one of our pricier monthly subscriptions, we’ve found that the time saved, ease of use, and collaborative features are well worth the cost.

4. Trello (Fog Creek Software)

Client-related tasks are handled by LAWgical’s in-house CRM, but there are a number of projects to which it is inapplicable. For these we use Trello, a collaborative visual app that organizes any continuous or long-term project on a board. Through the lists and cards on any one board, we can tell what’s being worked on, who’s working on it, and where it stands in the development process.

The beauty of Trello lies in its versatility. In the screenshot above, you can begin to see how I use Trello to plan social media on any given week… but that’s just one way to use it. We use Trello to collaborate on marketing campaigns, track progress on an SEO project, plan high-level content, help with software development… the sky’s the limit. Best of all? Trello is 100% free.

5. Zendesk

To say that we do a lot of technical support would be an understatement. We handle clients unable to log in to their accounts, feature requests for our software, internal tech issues and, of course, the occasional glitch. For a long time, we were handling these through email but with the scope of inquiries that we receive on a regular basis, things fell through the cracks. Enter Zendesk, virtual help-desk software. While somewhat confusing to implement, we’ve started to get the hang of it after seeking a little bit of technical assistance ourselves. Also of note is that the new ‘Lotus’ interface currently in Beta is vastly superior to Zendesk’s Classic iteration. There are countless integrations already available, but if the one you desire isn’t available, the flexible API allows for relatively easy in-house development.

To say that we do a lot of technical support would be an understatement. We handle clients unable to log in to their accounts, feature requests for our software, internal tech issues and, of course, the occasional glitch. For a long time, we were handling these through email but with the scope of inquiries that we receive on a regular basis, things fell through the cracks. Enter Zendesk, virtual help-desk software. While somewhat confusing to implement, we’ve started to get the hang of it after seeking a little bit of technical assistance ourselves. Also of note is that the new ‘Lotus’ interface currently in Beta is vastly superior to Zendesk’s Classic iteration. There are countless integrations already available, but if the one you desire isn’t available, the flexible API allows for relatively easy in-house development.

Today, all of our in-house support requests and any of our help requests for ServeManager are fielded through Zendesk. We can now easily keep track of new and ongoing requests, categorize incoming tickets with tags, and access valuable information such as the average time it takes to respond to any one request. Eventually, Zendesk may help field every customer service issue that comes to our email. In the meantime though, the more we use it, the more we can see where it will fit into our business in the long term.