Many of our support articles focus on the "how to" side of VizSwap's features, this one sheds light on the benefits and reasons you would want to use them!

Here's Why

1. Questionnaires - Keeping customers happy

This feature has been built with the goal of saving time and guiding customers in a friendly and approachable way. A wonderful use for this feature is to take all the questions that get asked in your first meeting with a customer, and adapt that similar to our How to Create a Questionnaire article does. Then your new client experience could look like this:

Onboarding communication
Automated information & visual resource collecting through Questionnaires
Initial meeting
The rest of your project lifecycle

It's a brand new experience to walk into a meeting confident and already knowing what is in your customer's head. Your customer will also be relieved and happy knowing that they have already provided the resources and info related to their vision. Instead of spending valuable time with repeatable questions and information that could have "been better as an email", let questionnaires do the heavy lifting and spend your first meeting making serious progress and building a relationship!

2. Projects & Boards - Organizing meetings and creating resources

Once you have a meeting with customers, it's common that they may leave not knowing where the results of the meeting are going. This is where you can use boards to organize the outcomes, selections, and notes from these meetings.

We recommend introducing VizSwap to your customers right off the bat so they can see the results from the questionnaires they filled out, and visually see how their project is being taken care of. Instead of going back at a later date to fill in notes from memory, have the project board pulled up during the meeting, snap pictures of notes, and upload relavent files that you will need! Having all these resources in one, easy to access place is a gamechanger. This removes the need to have repeated calls to double check outcomes. You choose what level of visibility your customers will have, and can be certain that when a meeting comes to a close, everyone will be on the same page and have access to all the resources they need as the project moves into the next phase. This is a way to build a relationship of trust with your customers.

Read our article How to Create Projects & Boards for more details on setting up a new project!

3. Activity Feeds - The real power of VizSwap

The activity feed will save so much time, it truly is the fast track to keep up-to-date with all the changes happening in your projects. As your business learns and grows with VizSwap, it will be important to stay aware as more projects and information flow through the platform. There are multiple ways to view the Activity Feed, each for a different important use:

Company Feed - see updates across your entire business
Project Feed - see updates for a specifc project
Customer Feed - see updates coming from a specific customer
Team Member Feed - see updates coming from a specific team member

Before heading to a follow up meeting, imagine checking a project's activity feed and seeing updates from the client that indicates you need to grab some additional designs to propose! Checking the activity feed is critical to sucessfully managing and operating in a fast paced environment.

For even more power and options, try learning the ins and outs of search filters when it comes to the activity feed. These allow you to really drill down and find exactly what you are looking for. More features and tips like this can be found in our Learn to be a Power User articles.

4. Project Stages - Staying accountable

In every sector and business, there are milestones to stay accountable to. Those milestones can be found by conceptually breaking down your business into the things you need to accomplish and track. The exact way you lay out project stages and deadlines will be unique to your business. An example project flow could look like this:

Design
Design Meeting
Client Review
Revision
Approved
In Progress
Delivered

Experiment with stages in your VizSwap account, and adjust them as you become more familar and establish how VizSwap can enhance your processes. Some users even use the current stages of their projects to form TODO lists for scheduling, correspondence, and all sorts of daily tasks. For more information read Using Project Stages & Due Dates.

5. Customers - Keeping contact information available

The Customers page of your VizSwap account is much more than a list of people you have invited to contribute to questionnaires and projects, it's a hub of contact info and a convenient way to check on customer satisfaction & engagement. Putting up-to-date information under your customer's profiles is a wonderful way to keep customer contact information out of your phone's normal contacts, and share that knowledge with your team!

Putting it All Together

There are quite a few awesome features packed into VizSwap, each one strives to bring simplicity and save time with a specific aspect of your business. VizSwap is intended to be adopted piece by piece and worked into your own style of operations.

Spend some time reflecting on your business's weaknesses, especially the ones that are actively stealing time and money. They key is identifying, acknowledging, and then attacking those problems one by one. VizSwap equips you with the tools to do this, and along the way change the mindset with which you approach collaboration and organization.

For some businesses working VizSwap into day-to-day operations could look like this:

uploading the results from meetings & job site visits for future reference by both customers and team members
using project boards as a single place to store things to simplify sharing and access! This is especially useful if you find yourself bombarded with requests for the same kinds of resources and files. Fix this by storing presentation documents like quotes, schematics, and designs alongside the related project!
delegating responsibilities to team members so that they can manage specific projects and activity feeds. VizSwap is best used as a team!
making a 1 to 1 relationship between project stages and your established proccess. This sets you up to assign deadlines that already make sense and give confidence you team's progress!

Running your business with Collaboration, Visibility, and Traceability in mind, makes for powerful outcomes!

The 5 Most Important Features to Understand