How to Communicate with Clients in ClickUp
Jeff walks through ClickUp's client communication features: shared lists, guest invites, and embedded views. Use these to centralize task updates and feedback in one place instead of juggling emails and messages.
As we all know, communicating with clients is extremely important. But nowadays teams might be communicating with their clients and internally in a bunch of different systems and tools. I mean, they might be communicating in email and then in Slack, they may be in teams, they may be in LinkedIn, they may be via text message, and I'm sure a lot of other different places that you've experienced. However, when this happens, all of that communication gets a little jumbled and lost and no one really knows fully what is happening. Especially, especially if someone goes out of the office and we're sending an email to them might get lost unless we have some sort of shared inbox. So yes, a lot of teams have moved to having a shared inbox or a shared Slack channel, which works very well. However, it's super, super efficient for your team and your clients to have all this communication happening in one place. So in this video, I'm going to be walking through a strategy for you to communicate with your clients inside of ClickUp to create that central source of truth. Let's get started. All right, so let's jump into ClickUp here and talk about how we can actually communicate with our clients inside of ClickUp. So the first thing that's going to be the most important is going to be your hierarchy and how this is all structured. So I've gone over this plenty of times. You'll see a video on the top right corner. Watch that. If you don't know our ClickUp hierarchy for agencies, but within this we're going to have a delivery space which is where all of our client work is going to live. In that we're then going to have client folders where all the work for that client is also going to live. And that way we can have all of it centralized in one place. So as you'll see here, I have my Dunder Mifflin folder in that I have lists, which is where the work is actually going to live for Dunder Mifflin. So as I see, most of my work is going to live in this retainer XYZ list. This is a retainer that we currently have going on with Dunder Mifflin. And then I have this account management list for sort of those account management strategy meetings, things like that as well. And then you'll see here I have a shared client list which I can rename if I want to, to like Zenpile, Dunder Mifflin. And so this blog post, what I want is the way that I communicate with my team internally is that all the communication is going to happen at the parent task. So I have this parent task here, this is our blog post. And then all the subtasks are essentially where all the work is going to happen. So everyone's going to go through all these steps. But the blog post here, the parent task is where all the communication will happen for my team. That way it's going to keep all the team communication in one place. However, most agencies and probably you do not want your clients to see everything that's happening with your communication and you don't want them to see like all the behind the scenes stuff. You just want them to be able to communicate with sort of your drafts or the deliverables that you want to send them and get review on them and then send it back. And then they'll send it back and then you'll publish it. But we don't want them to see all of this. This is our internal work. We don't want to open up everything to them. So what you can do is I'll show you this example. You can create the shared client list right here inside of the client folder. And if you create this as a template, which I have another video on there, which I'll link up in the top right of this video as well as well in the video description that goes over this kind of template, you'll create this list inside of the folder template. And then you could have this on every single client if you want instead of having to build it from scratch. But in this all this is going to be is going to be all the stuff that they see. So, so what I can do, the first thing is going to be in this client list. What I need to do after I create it is I need to actually invite them to it. So I'm going to come here to sharing of permissions. I'm going to go to invite by name or email and I'm going to invite Michael Scott as a guest. I already have him in here, so I'm not going to do that. As you can see here, I have Michael Scott here as a guest. He can only comment on anything right here. So that's exactly what we want. But you want to add your clients as guests in invite them to the shared client lists. That way all Michael is going to see when he logs in here is going to be the shared client list. That's why I said you can rename it a little bit something different. Like here I have shrut farms and Zen palette so I can name it like that instead of just shared client list like I have here but within this I'm able to do a few things. One, this is going to be sort of their portal and I've done another video on a portal as well. As you can see here, I can go to this and this is kind of my way. If I create a portal for Michael, I can just share this as a public doc and he won't have access to ClickUp whatsoever. So he can't communicate with me inside of ClickUp but he can see everything in one place. If he wants to communicate with us, he'll have buttons and things that he can click out to if he wants to submit a request via this form, so on and so forth. But he's not able to communicate on anything instead of ClickUp with just this portal, which again, another video that I've done before, I'm all linked in the video description below. However, with this one he is able to communicate with us. So what I can do is when I create a task here in this list, I am able to take this and so let's just copy the task name of it like that. I can take this and now I can move this into this shared client list right here. So let's just do that case study Stone Cooper and Granny Attorneys at Law and I can just turn this into. I can just name this if I want to to be client communication. So you can come up with any sort of naming convention that you want. Sometimes this is easiest. Just name it, whatever is easiest for you and the client to know what it actually is. And what I can do is I can go and I can assign this to Michael so that he'll make sure he'll get all the notifications on it. I can put a due date, the due date of that will essentially match this one. Just sounds a bit overdue. Sorry, Michael a little bit behind here. I'm just going to put that as yesterday. Just like that. And then what I'm able to do now is all the communication that happens with Michael is going to live on this task. And so it's a little bit separated from the other task. But what I can do now, and this is great in this new task view is I can come here, I can add a link and I can link a task to this. So what I'm able to do is now link the other task to this one. So I want this, I'm going to type in case study Stone Cooper. We need to get that to come up. And there we go. So that's my actual task. So now this is linked to the other Tasks that I can easily navigate from one task to the next as you can see here. If I go here to my task links it's also going to live right there. So I'm able to navigate back and forth between the two here. So that's how I would set it up. Essentially every single task in here that we're actually doing, which these are the actionable tasks that we're performing for Michael. I then create a communication task in here so that all the communication that were happening between us and Michael goes into that task into the parent task. So what that's going to look like now is I have this one here for paper 101. As you can see I have my task link directly to that. So if I go to this, you'll see our communication that's happening. We have a featured thumbnail for him that we need to send to Michael to get a little bit of feedback on. So what I can do is I can take this and just as John Smith sent this to me, I need to make sure I go to this over here and I leave that as a comment for Michael here. So I'm going to Ichael Scott, here's the blog thumbnail for your review. And so Michael now what is going to happen is if you set up his notifications correctly where he gets emails for any time he's at mentioned he will then which that's where you kind of need a little education and training component to it to help him set that up. But he'll get an email on this that sends him a notification that says hey exactly this, here's the blog thumbnail for your review. It's not going to show this image necessarily but it'll show him that. So he could either choose to view the like, view the comment and come directly to ClickUp via button that's on an email or he can reply directly from that email. So if this is not necessarily something like this, maybe it's a link up to something else. You can click on that link and comment directly from the email. If he does comment from the email you'll see this is what shows up Reply like communication paper 101. This looks great Jeff. Thank you. Comment sent via email that way so he can do that. Otherwise if he comes in here that's going to give him a bit more ability to reply to this via thread. He can also click on it and leave comments like this say hey Jeff, I don't like this part of it or this part of this part of it. So I would recommend that they do that. I think it's a bit easier for them to give better feedback on something, but that's how you can communicate with them inside of this task. Again, it's separate from our other task, but it's linked together like this. So there's a bit of a setup, but it's going to make it much easier for sort of anything you're communicating with them on. They have it all in this one list. So as you have more projects or deliverables, it's all going to live here. I can create a view and then Michael can see anything that lives in this client list. He's not going to see any of this task linking or anything. He's only going to see what's in the list. So you won't have access to anything else. So that makes it easier for us to not show him everything that's happening, but just show him what he needs to see. So that makes it again, very easy to communicate with clients right there. And in addition to the shareclient list, we what else I'm able to do now is I can, similar to what I showed earlier again in a different video with the portal that we have here that then shows him all the public views for our completed projects, our completed deliverables, our progress report and things like that. I can also take these. So I'm not even going to need a portal, unless you want one. I could embed this portal directly in that list if I wanted to. That way it's all one place. Or I can just say, hey, I'm going to have the share client list. We're going to communicate on there. And now I want to take these public views. So if I go here to the views we've created for Michael, one of them is completed deliverables. I can take this view. I can go into sharing of permissions. I can copy this public link. Now I'm going to go back to my share client list. I'm going to add a view just like this, embed it. So I'm embedding ClickUp into ClickUp, which sounds kind of funny, but I can do that. And now I can paste that and there I can rename this to completed deliverables. And so Michael, now all he's going to see is a shared client list. He'll see this completed deliverables view embedded into here. If I again, I wanted to embed that client portal doc in here as a public view, I could do that as well. But now Michael, all he's going to see is the Share client list. He'll see sort of his tasks in here for our communication purposes. He'll see it all. It's all going to be centralized for us and the team so multiple people can jump into this thread to see all that you can. And we could communicate back and forth with Michael this way so a lot of different options that you have. Again, Shared Client list is a great way to communicate with them and have all of this sort of set up for them to communicate. Again, it's going to be a little bit separated from our actual tasks that are happening in our retainer XYZ list, but you can link them together just like that to navigate from one to the other. Again, if someone clicks into this, they need to see more because of the new task view structure. I can come here and navigate from one to the other. So there's one strategy that you can leverage to improve client communication inside of ClickUp. Obviously takes a little bit of training of your clients, but once they learn how to do it, it's going to make communication that much easier for everyone and keep it just all in one place. If you need help with this or just want to completely transform your operations inside of ClickUp, go to zenpalot.com call and book a call with one of our experts. We are ClickUp's first and highest rate solutions partner and we'd love to help you build a more productive, profitable and healthy team by streamlining your operations inside of ClickUp. At Senpai, we've helped close to 3,000 different agencies increase productivity, increase profitability, gain visibility into profitability, utilization and client health as well as just create a system that runs without you. So if you need help with any of that, we are here to help. Taking your operation seriously will change your life and I want you to experience this life changing impact. I cannot wait for you to be our next agency success story. I'll see you again next time. Can I make no more I can't replace it Trying hardest not to waste it. It's about time it's about time.
