The Activity Stream: A Breakthrough for Service Professionals

Habits can lurk in the shadows and create problems we aren’t aware of. Communicating in disjointed ways can sometimes become such a habit among professional services teams. Outdated or inefficient methods of managing communication could slow down your projects, create internal misunderstanding or — worst of all — damage your client relationships.

According to Salesforce, 86% of executives say ineffective collaboration and communication are to blame for failure in business. 

It’s important to uncover your team’s collective communication issues (especially the ones you may not have seen clearly before) and offer effective solutions. We’re going to take a look at how poor communication can get out of control and how client-based teams like yours are using Accelo to solve this problem. 

The Scattered Communication Problem

Think about how many different ways you currently keep in touch with team members about internal work and with prospects and clients throughout their journey. For example, you might follow a path like this:  

1. Manually add contact info for leads into an email marketing platform
2. Add notes about the same contacts in your CRM when they become prospects
3. House quotes and contracts in yet another software or file
4. Create an onboarding spreadsheet for each new client
5. Send project status updates to the client from individual account managers’ emails
6. Take client meeting notes and maintain task lists using individual methods
7. Collect client requests through a form that goes to one person’s email 
8. Store client invoice and payment history in your accounting software 
9. Send communication about payments from a billing manager’s email
10. Create notes about recurring work and retainer terms in your contract file

Your team accumulates inefficiency at every step along this trail because of a lack of visibility. Not having visibility over a client’s history of sales, requests, projects, invoices and more makes it hard to find information and provide top-notch service. Your employees, workflows and clients are affected.

Impact on Employees

With improper communication and limited visibility, your team could struggle to make sense of where a client stands. It can be difficult to complete project work accurately, respond to client requests appropriately and know what the rest of the team is working on. Employees might therefore feel frustrated. Managers could be frazzled. And new hires may have a hard time catching up.

Impact on Workflows 

How people communicate is intertwined with how they complete tasks. If communication isn’t working well, you could have a workflow problem — or vice versa. Using too many platforms or repeating manual steps can create hidden bottlenecks that break down your processes and slow down nearly every stage of client work. 

Impact on Clients

Issues within your workflows will eventually transfer to your clients. They’ll notice when you can’t provide quick status updates, take care of one-off requests easily or handle adjustments to a project. Once your team’s communication starts impacting your clients, it can be hard to recover.

Why Accelo’s Activity Stream Is the Solution

It’s shocking when something that seems like a complex problem has a simple solution. That’s exactly what happens when new Accelo users experience the power of the Activity Stream firsthand. 

The Activity Stream compiles all of the communication and activity that pertains to a given client or company in one convenient feed. It’s like a social media feed but better — because it displays the key information your team needs to keep the business running efficiently. 

Perhaps the best part is the email capture: You don’t have to waste time asking around for the latest on a request or wonder what a team member recently said to a client when they’re out sick. It’s all readily available in one place.

In other words, the Activity Stream solves multiple communication-related issues at once.

See what real users say about Accelo’s popular Stream feature.

Real Stories: When Visibility Wins

The long-term positive effects of the Stream speak for themselves. These three service firms started out with unique challenges that Accelo addressed with this automated visibility solution:  

• AREI Designs found client correspondence challenging because they spent so much time tracking and saving document iterations. Centralized communication via Accelo reduced the firm’s administrative work by 80%. 
• DesignWorks Group was using a paper-based approach to communication and found that each department was siloed. With Accelo, the agency saved thousands of dollars and took on 30% more work.
• HDMZ found it tough to keep everyone informed and struggled with training because they had so many logins and relied on email. Using Accelo had a tangible effect on everything from company culture to efficiency to employee turnover.

Ready to see what the Activity Stream could do for your team’s communication? Start a free trial or set up a demo of Accelo.

About the Author

Alec DiRienzo is a Solutions Consultant at Accelo, where he works closely with prospective clients and demonstrates how they will use the platform on a day-to-day basis. With over five years of experience in the SaaS industry, Alec focuses on highlighting product capabilities in both pre-sale and post-sale environments. He enjoys “digging in” to fully understand how Accelo solves prospects' challenges.