Top tools behind the success of every website development agency

Are you a freelancer? Have you recently launched your service-based business? Are you planning to scale your website development agency? If the answer to any of these questions is affirmative, the primary entity of your business will be the same. And that's your clients. With the time being, it will be tough to manage your multiple clients. We know that it takes a lot of time to pitch and convert even a single client. After bearing all this pressure, for sure you don't want to risk any of your clients. But, remembering the huge buck of every project isn't possible for anyone. The only way to improve your customer experience is to maintain transparency and accomplish your milestones as per the set deadlines. Your duty is not only towards your present clients, but your prospective clients are also your responsibility. In this blog, we will guide you with the effective business tools and software that every website development agency uses, and you can use as well to streamline different tasks of your business.

Customer-end tools:

For your visitors, to-be-clients, and prospective customers; the helpdesk software and tools are essential. The primary interaction with clients begins with these tools only. That's why your customer interaction tools must be robust and sturdy. The tools are: Tawk.to: Tawk.to is the free live-chat tool that you can integrate to your website and offer live assistance to your customers. As long as you are managing your chats as a single-user, you can get benefited with the free version, later, you can upgrade to the paid plan. Even in the free version, you can communicate with unlimited chats, raise tickets when you are offline, and auto-initiate conversation when someone is surfing for a long time. This helps you connect with the leads, even when you aren't present. When customers know that there is someone to attend them, they feel more urge to connect with that brand. Zendesk: You can call it a saviour for your freelance business or small enterprise. It allows you to raise, create and manage tickets with all the basic to advanced business functionalities. You can host community as well as forum discussions and answer common issues over there. With easy integrations, you can link your common business apps like CRM, storage and so on to help you maintain the productivity of your business. As it will be tough for you to manage and check each of these applications distinctly, you can opt for integration and streamline your business within the chosen budget cap. Zohodesk: Being one of the most effective help desk platforms, it allows multi-channel support; thus, enabling you to communicate with your customers across different channels. Leveraging the power of AI, namely Zia, Zoho learns the interaction pattern of the customer and tries to attend to your customers on a more human level, in your absence. This helps you redirect your customers, especially if they have any common concern or previously asked issue.

Client interaction tools:

For real-time interaction with your clients, you can't merely rely on video calls, but there are several other functionalities to count on. Your ultimate goal is to make your client feel that you are beside them in their project room and they can trust you with their dreams. You can count on the tools like: Zoom: One of the finest tools for trouble-free video conferencing and meeting conduction, witnessed a massive surge of 200 million to 300 millions in a month in 2020 due to COVID outbreak across the nation. In the newly adopted work-from-home, culture businesses are widely relying on Zoom conferencing tool. The top features responsible for this fan base are video recording, multiple-screen sharing, meeting scheduling, document, video, screen sharing, and above all the quality of voice and video. You can chat and share files on different boards and chat rooms. Thus, reduces the need of project management tools distinctly. And, the best thing is, it is available for free unless you want to host a meeting with more than 100 people at once. If you haven't tried yet, you must go ahead and download it right now! Skype: Skype is the oldest professional buddy of almost everyone out there. Skype is also available for free, as long as you are connected to the internet and another person is on Skype, you can easily connect and communicate. Skype was initially started to ease the communication between people and allow calling across the nation as well as internationally; now, it is offering fantastic support for client collaboration. You can share screens, communicate in groups and add individuals to the call. But, you can not schedule any meeting and connect separately. You can conference call to the entire team at once and conduct your online sessions. For better customer experience, it is recommended to sign up for Skype for business instead of the complimentary version. Join.me: Join.me is known for its simplicity. Since, it works on the web you need not worry about the device space or any external plugins to support easy functioning. If you are handling your business with freelancers and remote workers, you will adore it. It's a feature, named as whiteboarding, allows members to draw and share their ideas on the virtual paper, this eases experience in real-time. Just like whiteboard discussions in the meeting room, you can do in the virtual meeting room. With unique meeting links secured with passwords, you need not worry about security of your meeting and collaboration. Though it's a paid tool, you can use it for free upto three team members, and this makes it an ideal choice for startups.

Project management tools:

Slack: Slack has a huge fan base as an interactive project management tool. Using the features like named chat rooms, direct messaging, adding the files sharing regular task among teams turns easy. Slack enables community based interactions to ease the communication. You can download the API to link with Google Drive, Salesforce, Dropbox, Asana, Zendesk and numerous others. This will centralize the conversation and let you mark the notifications based on priority. Thus, minimizes distraction and help you concentrate on what's important. Trello: As a freelancer, when you are working on more than one projects, the deadline of some of them may slip from your mind. To help you organize your tasks in such a case, you can count on Trello to organize and prioritize your projects. You can create distinct boards and set your tasks; you can collaborate with the team and create rule-based triggered responses. Scheduling of tasks help you manage and hit the deadline in prior. You can integrate the additional apps like Google drive, dropbox, Evernote, slacks and a few more. When you have everything centrally available at one place as per your business needs, the interactions with clients will not be a headache anyway. The best thing is you can download it on your smartphone and add or update tasks even on the go. Zipboard: If you own a website development agency, you must count Zipboard, as it allows the designers and developers to collaborate and get clients' feedback upon the designs. This makes it the choice of developers as well as designers.

Marketing Support tools

Irrespective of your business niche, you have to market your products as well as services online. With over 3.8 billion active social media users out of 4.5 billion internet users in 2020, you surely can't drop an idea of business promotion on social media platforms. However, it's tough to keep your social media alive when you are busy serving your first clients. If anyone is said to choose between client and personal branding, obviously the client will be selected. You can count on the below tools to help you manage both hand-in-hand: HootSuite: The best thing is you can link 3 of your social handles within a single account and that too for free! Well, that's the benefit of an individual plan. So, you can create your posts on weekends and schedule them for the weekdays. If you are offering the services of social media management or brand reputation management, you can upgrade with the professional account and manage the social media for your clients as well. If you still don't believe in the utility of the tool for your business, you can register with the professional plan and claim a 30-days free trial. With the paid plan, there are numerous advanced features for you to explore. Sprout social: Though Sprout social is not free, you can use it for your website design agency to push brand reputation management as an add-on service. It helps you with the management of social handles, allow customer interaction and showcase the analytics reports. The intuitive dashboard design makes it easier to use. The above tools are useful to get your business running and automate some of your tasks. We aren't telling these are only ones, but these are often used. Some of these tools work better for your business than others. If you have any other recommendation, feel free to share in the comment section below.