For years, email has been the de facto method of communication between agencies, designers, developers and their clients but is it time to ditch it as the main form of communication when collection feedback and bug reports from clients?
We Freelance surveyed several agencies about their main form of communication with their clients and email is still the most common form of communication between agencies and their clients. Out of 10 respondents, six said their clients communicated feedback through email. Other respondents said they got feedback through the phone or in-person, through Discord and Upwork while one respondent said their clients used a website feedback tool to give feedback.
Email, while a useful tool, comes with many drawbacks. For example, two agencies said that one of the hurdles they experienced with email is getting their clients to respond and the time it takes their clients to respond. Another said that there are sometimes sudden changes in feedback that are not communicated in the emails.
In an era where we have solutions for almost everything, is email the right one to collect feedback? One solution to this problem is by gathering feedback straight from the client’s website through the use of a widget. This eliminates wordy messages and a long chain of emails and may even solve the issue where the client forgets details about the feedback or bug.
Some of the big players in the bug and feedback reporting business are bugherd.com and marker.io as well as smaller companies such as clientbuddy.net and shakebugs.com.
The advantages with this solution is that all bugs and feedback submitted go into a centralised dashboard where they can be assigned to your designer or developer to fix and many of these companies allow you to integrate your project management tools to export these tasks to your board. The biggest advantage to using tools like this is that screenshots are automatically included in the reports, as well as metadata such as the client’s screen dimensions and browser.
For those clients who are resistant to new technology, clientbuddy.net even allows your client to email in their feedback to a specific email address where it would be logged into the dashboard as a task.
While this solution is not free, and might not resolve the issue where clients are not responding or are slow to respond, it certainly can help to eliminate long back-and-forth email chains and clients not including information such as whether the bug was found on a mobile or desktop display.
Not only will it help your team to speed up development and implementation, it will also save you time. According to one client of bugherd.com, it has saved them at least three to four hours per week compared to traditional methods of feedback and bug reporting through email.
What has your experience been with communicating with clients through email? Have you tried website feedback tools? We would love to hear your thoughts. Email us at david [at] wefreelance.uk.
If you are interested, you can try out clientbuddy.net for free for 14 days.