Effective Communication Management Softwares: A Comparison Of Airtable, Slack, And Chatwork
Importance of Effective Communication in Organizations
Discuss about the Guide to Live Chat Implementation.
Effective communication plays a vital role in the success of any organization. The effective communication ensures timely and accurate transfer of information. Effective communication is the backbone of decision making process. The main objective of communication management is to establish a smooth flow of information among the group of people (Oliver, 2011).
The objective of good communication is to create difference between reality and one’s perception of reality. It can be considered as the media component of the project. The communication management softwares help the project manager in providing the relevant information to all the members of the team. Communication management can be defined as a set of activities related to generation, collection and presentation of information within the organization (Tutorialspoint, 2018).
The investigation depicts the essential features of the communication software. The reports establish interaction between different softwares used in the communication management. The report makes a comparison between the different communication applications and makes an analysis on the basis of consumer needs. It provides the advantages of using a communication app in an organization.
It can be defined as a business collaboration application. It helps the organizations in conducting online business meetings, conferences, presentations and enabling everyone in the company in joining the conversation.
It is not required to install the software for this software, it is cloud hosted service software.
Skype is beneficial for large and small corporations. It is a free service and enables the mangers to hold online meetings. It is an cost effective and easy means of communication software. The easy to use feature of skype makes it popular communication system for any business.
This software was designed to meet the social interaction and communication needs of the organization. It is beneficial for both internal and external communication. It helps the management in making collaboration more productive by improving its communication strategies. It is aimed to improve the communication between the diverse team members or with customers. It is user friendly. The analytics and reporting of the software can be customized according the needs of the user. It can be used as a cloud service or can be implemented in the intranet of the organization (Communications-software, 2018).
Airtable can be defined as a smart collaboration tool which enables the managers to manage projects, ideas and customers. It is a user mobile friendly application. It comprised various smartphone and desktop apps. It enables the user to organize meeting with anyone from anywhere. It is designed as a database with text fields, forms and integrations. It supports integration with various other communication softwares like dropbox, slack and gitihub etc. it helps arrangement of data in grid view (Getapp, 2018).
Overview of Communication Management Softwares
The slack provides the management to organize the project. It enables the managers to work with public channels so that marketing team can coordinate with designing team and sales team. It helps in connecting the tools and services of the business with different application used centrally (Branscombe, 2017).
It removes the burden of follow up emails, and connecting between different dashboards etc. It enables the managers with smarter way of making effective decisions quickly (Blueprintdigital, 2018).
It provides the company with comprehensive knowledge with its automatic indexing and achieving function. It helps in searching information easily whenever required (Getapp, 2018).
Chatwork is a group chat app for the organizations. With various team members projects become complex and time consuming because of lots of emails, many files of data to keep track of everything. The process becomes stressful and frustrating. There should be an easier and effective communication method for the team members.
It provides the team with a streamlined way to communicate. It provides the team with chartrooms to have conversation about each project. It makes every team member enable to see plan, progress and all the details related to the project.
It provides the team with a user friendly and synchronized platform to work together (Getapp, 2018).
Software selected for evaluation
The three software selected for evaluation in this report are Airtable, Slack and Chatwork.
Airtable is a user friendly platform used for creating databases to make communication more effective. It helps in collaborating information about anything like employee directories or product inventories without the requirement of SQL. Airtable also provides the users with the features of API. With the help of Zapier the data of Airtable can be liked to other communication apps. The cost and accessibility advantage of Airtable makes it more suitable for users (William Porter, 2016).
Slack can be defined as a messaging app for better communication management in the organization. It helps the team in communicating from any place instantly. It provides the users with the feature of sharing files with anyone. It has the built in feature to filter and sort files according to the need of user. Slack has been categorized among one of three top communication software products. The users have reviewed slack as a good communication and collaborating tool (Financesonline, 2018).
Chatwork helps the team in sharing ideas, solving problems and maintaining bond. It keeps conversations of team members on track from all around the world. Sometimes it becomes a distracting place for the business communication because of various conversations not related to the current topic. The software has in built feature of to-do-list to mark actionable ideas as task and that task will remain in your chat view until the check off. It helps the team in connecting and making follow up about the projects. It also provides the user the facility to edit his own message (Zapier, 2018).
Features of Airtable, Slack, and Chatwork
The three softwares are evaluated are the platform supported, customers, support and features.
|
Criteria |
Weight |
Chatwork |
Slack |
Airtable |
|
20% |
60% |
50% |
40% |
|
|
Online support |
30% |
60% |
50% |
70% |
|
Integrations |
20% |
40% |
10% |
10% |
|
SSl Security |
15% |
70% |
60% |
20% |
|
Video Conferencing |
15% |
80% |
80% |
0% |
|
Score |
100% |
61% |
48% |
34% |
|
Topic |
Airtable |
Slack |
Chatwork |
|
Platforms Supported |
Web based, iphone app, android app |
Web based, iphone app, android app |
Web based, iphone app, android app |
|
Customers |
Freelancers, small businesses, mid-sized business, enterprise |
Freelancers, small businesses, mid-sized business, enterprise |
Freelancers, small businesses, mid-sized business, enterprise |
|
Support |
Online support, knowledge base, video tutorials |
Online support, knowledge base, video tutorials |
Online support |
|
Features |
integration, API, automatic notifications, collaborative workplace, communication management, drag and drop interface, file management, tagging, third party integration, |
API, Application integration, automatic notifications, chat, collaboration tools, communication management, instant messaging, real time data, SSL security, tagging, third party integration, |
API, Automatic notification, chat, collaboration tools, communication management, file management, instant messaging, video conferencing, real time data SSL security, Search functionality. |
Platform supported is an important feature as the users are more likely towards the applications with online in comparison to cloud based system. The SSL Security is an important feature for any communication system because the leakage of confidential information may cause a huge loss to organization. Integration with the other apps provides the user with more efficient means of communication and data handling. Video conferencing is important for any communication application because the team members sitting at different places would be able to discuss the issue efficiently with it.
The weighing criteria evaluates that Chatwork provides more features like SSL Security, API and other features. It provides the feature of video conferencing to the team members from anywhere at any time. The platforms supported are online and cloud based. It is more user friendly interface as compare to Airtable. The integration feature helps the user to link the database of chatwork with other apps like slack, dropbox etc.
Airtable has built in feature to connect with many other communication apps like dropbox, Asana, Email and Slack etc.
The zapier will establish link between Airtable and Dropbox. The user needs to add files in dropbox and the zapier will automatically synchronize the files between the dropbox and airtable.
The different communication apps can be connected with the help integromat. It can transfer and transform data between various apps.
Slack integrates the messages from other communication apps like twitter, Google drive, dropbox and maichimp etc. it helps the user to find information from one search box across all these tools.
In Airtable empty records are also counted as trigger records. The Airtable does not provide the feature of plotting graphs or chart and API features for sorting of data. It is an expensive system for small sized companies. It also lacks in providing scheduled notifications and work back timelines (Getapp, 2018).
Slack is based on channel user interface and the employees are more likely towards the chatting app like whatsapp. The notification system of slack is deficient and buggy. It makes the processors slow down their processing speed. It provides limited content sharing on mobiles (Captureapp, 2018).
The implementation of Airtable can be improved with conversations like Google docs. The spreadsheet like data should have the feature the height of rows. It should provide the feature of dealing with more than one formula in single cell. It should support API sorting feature to filter data. The communication softwares should be adopted by organizations to increase efficiency and productivity of the organization. The employees should be motivated to join such apps to connect with their team members and be notified with the updates of the projects. The organizations should try to connect customers, investors and partners etc on the chat rooms of the company to inform them about the productive measures.
References
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Branscombe, M. (2017) Microsoft Teams review: Serious competition for Slack and HipChat [online]. Available from: https://www.zdnet.com/product/microsoft-teams/ [Accessed 20 May 2018].
Captureapp (2018) The Pro’s and Con’s of Slack [online]. Available from: https://captureapps.com/pros-cons-slack/ [Accessed 20 May 2018].
Communications-software (2018) Top 10 Communications Software Systems [online]. Available from: https://communications-software.financesonline.com/top-10-communications-software-solutions/ [Accessed 18 May 2018].
Financesonline (2018) Slack Review [online]. Available from: https://reviews.financesonline.com/p/slack/ [Accessed 19 May 2018].
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Getapp (2018) Airtable vs Slack vs ChatWork Comparison Chart [online]. Available from: https://www.getapp.com/project-management-planning-software/a/airtable/compare/chatwork-vs-slack/ [Accessed 19 May 2018].
Getapp (2018) ChatWork [online]. Available from: https://www.getapp.com/collaboration-software/a/chatwork/ [Accessed 19 May 2018].
Getapp (2018) Cloud baed organization and collabration tool [online]. Available from: https://www.getapp.com/project-management-planning-software/a/airtable/ [Accessed 19 May 2018].
Getapp (2018) Slack [online]. Available from: https://www.getapp.com/collaboration-software/a/slack/ [Accessed 18 May 2018].
Integromat(2018) Airtable, Dropbox integrations [online]. Available from: https://www.integromat.com/en/integrations/airtable/dropbox [Accessed 18 May 2018].
Oliver, C.E. (2011) Communications management. Project Mnagement, 14(1), pp.28-30.
Tutorialspoint(2018) Communications Management [online]. Available from: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/management_concepts/communications_management.htm [Accessed 19 May 2018].
William Porter (2016) Airtable review: A drop-dead easy relational database management system [online]. Available from: https://www.macworld.com/article/3036505/software/airtable-review-a-drop-dead-easy-relational-database-management-system.html [Accessed 19 May 2018].
Wpcurve(2013) The practical guide to live chat implementation [online]. Available from: https://wpcurve.com/the-practical-guide-to-live-chat-implementation/ [Accessed 20 May 2018].
Zapier(2018) ChatWork – Features, Pricing, Alternatives, and More [online]. Available from: https://zapier.com/apps/chatwork [Accessed 20 May 2018].