Agency owners are always on the lookout for tools that simplify communication and collaboration with clients. Web design and development are becoming increasingly detail-oriented. Now more than ever, managers need to make sure that they are able to realize their client’s vision and bring it to life.
Without the right tool for collaboration, this can be quite difficult. If you’re a WordPress agency, you might find it difficult to come up with a viable solution to reduce friction and cut down on back-and-forth between clients. It can be quite difficult to set up a website according to your client’s specifications, only to find that they want something different.
Enter Atarim. Created by Vito Peleg, Atarim is a collaborative tool designed for agencies to minimize back-and-forth between clients and to allow for effective task management. With so many moving parts associated with each project, managers often have to use multiple tools to keep everything ticking. Atarim was created to bring everything under one roof and simplify task management and deliverables.
From Frustration to Innovation – Atarim’s Vision
Atarim wasn’t always known as Atarim. In fact, it started off as an entirely different plugin called WP Feedback. Vito Peleg created WP Feedback after facing difficulties in managing clients at his own agency. They used elaborate Google Sheets and tried their hand at several project management systems. However, none really worked out for them.
Vito realized that they had to come up with an in-house solution. Thus, the foundations of Atarim were laid. WP Feedback was simple enough for non-technical clients to understand. Plus, it allowed Vito’s agency to reduce back and forth between clients.
Before even designing a landing page, Vito and his team surveyed almost 600 WordPress professionals to figure out how they conducted business. By highlighting simple pain points, Vito was able to create a landing page that resulted in high conversions. In fact, WP Feedback became the first product by a new company to reach six figures in sales in just the first month of launch!
In just under 18 months, the platform received more than 150 new features. And according to the data, this helped agencies save almost 80% of their time which was spent going back and forth with clients.
By 2020, WP Feedback, as it was known back then, had marked over 100,000 tasks complete. It was a resounding success, and Vito and his team continued to tweak the platform and add new features. In February, WP Feedback rebranded itself to Atarim, heralding a new vision for the company.
The product evolved into a cloud-based SaaS application with a plugin, instead of a standalone plugin.
Managing Client Websites from a Single Dashboard
There are two important aspects of Atarim: the client interface plugin (which you must install on your client’s websites), and the Agency Dashboard. The Dashboard, as shown above, is where the magic happens.
As a freelancer or an agency, your primary focus will be the Agency Dashboard. The Dashboard gives you a clear view of all the projects in your agency. It also shows you a comprehensive overview of team activity and offers time tracking for multiple tasks. This makes it easy for agency owners and managers to determine where resources are tied up, who’s working on what, and if any new tasks have been assigned by the client.
It’ll help you track the productivity and performance of individual team members very conveniently.
Getting Feedback – Figuring Out What Clients Are Trying to Say
One of the best features of Atarim is that it significantly cuts down on communication barriers. This, in turn, allows clients to provide specifications and highlight their requirements. When the client requests a change, the plugin automatically takes a screenshot and captures the details of the browser and the screen size.
With a single click, the team can view all the tasks assigned to them, along with the exact location of where the change is required. Once done, they can simply mark the tasks as complete.
Atarim sends notifications to specific team members via email as well as within the app. This virtually removes all bottlenecks during communication with clients, and also ensures that all team members are on the same page.
Without Atarim, the workflow would look something like this:
- Agency manager or owner talks to the client to figure out what they want.
- Then, they create a task on any of the project management tools that they use.
- The team member must find the website domain, log in, and identify the problem.
- Correct the issue, and then posts it on the project management tool.
- The manager then gets in touch with the client to let them know that their issue has been resolved.
Atarim simplifies this completely, condensing five steps into one.
Bring Your Team, Start Powering Through Tasks
Atarim’s management platform is designed to help teams track their activity on a day-to-day basis and finish tasks depending upon urgency. From determining who is responsible for a specific task to assigning an urgency for each task, Atarim was very much designed to help teams cut down on friction during their work.
Each day, the team can log into a unified dashboard to view their tasks. Instead of having to rely on a bunch of different tools like Slack, Asana, WhatsApp, or Trello, every member of the team can view tasks assigned to them through the Agency Dashboard. They can then complete tasks and add notes or specifications with each task.
The team can view tasks based on the websites that are assigned to them. This means that each member will only be shown information pertinent to them. With a single click, they can view information associated with each task. Once a task is marked complete, it is moved to a relevant position on the Kanban board, as shown above.
The client then receives an automatic notification that a specific task has been completed. In this way, they’ll know exactly what work is being done. With a simplified visual interface, teams can easily complete tasks and have them reviewed by the client. Since everything happens through a unified dashboard, there’s no reason to move between multiple tools.
Teach Clients How to Use Their Websites
One of the most popular use cases of Atarim is that it allows web developers and designers to guide clients on how to use their websites properly. Your clients are obviously not going to be as tech-savvy as you in most cases. They might not know how specific features work on their WordPress website, and that’s where Atarim comes in.
Instead of creating an extensive document with detailed information for your clients, Atarim allows you to leave feedback and answer questions directly on the page. The client can leave their questions on the page itself, so your team has context to the questions being asked.
Once the team member receives a notification, they just have to click on the image, leave their feedback or answer the client’s question, and that’s it!
With Atarim, you can leave comments directly on the page. Clients would therefore know what each feature does, and more importantly, how it works. In this way, you won’t have to worry about clients coming back after several weeks to ask questions about specific features.
Summary – Try Atarim To Make Dealing With Every Client Easy & More Profitable
If you haven’t given Atarim a try yet, now might be the right time! Atarim was designed to help freelancers and agencies communicate better with their clients, and in the process, help them generate maximum profits from their work. One of the things that most agency owners are scared of is scope creep.
What if a client wants to change the requirements of a specific task? Or what if they request something extra that wasn’t specified in the original contract? With Atarim’s time tracking features, you and the client will know just how much time each task has taken, thus allowing you to bill them accurately.
More importantly, if the client requests something outside of their requirements, you can let them know about the additional costs and the time spent on that specific task, thus maximizing your profits. Because every task is tracked and recorded within the dashboard, the entire process remains completely transparent.
Atarim is the future of collaboration for WP agencies, and if you haven’t already started using it, it’s time to give it a try. The team is highly committed to adding new features to the tool, so it’s only going to get better!
