How to create a compelling space to collaborate with clients

When you’re working with clients, you want to put your best foot forward. In order to do great work together, it’s important to keep lines of communication open, make it easy to find shared files, and provide a customized space for collaboration.

In this article, we’ll walk through how to set up a client room for all of your shared files, applications, and documents. You’ll be able to organize all of your work and tools on a visual canvas for better meetings, feedback in context, and asynchronous iteration.

How to set up your new client room:

1. Create a new room in Switchboard for your client.

For the name of your room, use a combination of your company, your client’s company and/or the project you’re working on together. For example, “Acme Co and Beta Agency – Project Apollo”.

Pro tip: wait to invite other people until you finish setting up the room.

2. Brand the experience

Create a custom, branded experience by changing the room background to match your color palette. Click the name of the room in the top left and ‘Edit the room settings’ to change the background. We suggest avoiding busy patterns or textures that might distract from your work.

3. Add sections and key resources

A section is a container to label and organize the content you add to the room. You can think of them as visual folders that display interactive files. The most common section types are Agenda, Reference materials, For review, and Approved. You can add multimedia content to each section ranging from websites to PDFs to video files. Here are some example of what you can add to each section:

• Agenda: An existing Google Doc or Notion page, or create your own agenda with the in-room notepad
• Reference materials: JIRA boards, calendars, research reports – whatever your client needs to refer to before/after/during a meeting
• For review: Figma files, briefs, or any other document that needs input
• Approved: Final files and documentation of decisions made

To add content to a section, you can copy and paste directly into the section or add from the toolbar at the bottom of the room. Note: You’ll need to log into your tools like you would in your local browser, but will only need to log back in periodically after that.

4. Add more context to your meetings

Now that your room is set up with all of your materials, you can start having all your meetings and spontaneous conversations in this room. Simply click the Share button to invite clients and internal team members to the room. Feel free to add the room link to a calendar invite or pin it to a relevant Slack channel.

Before Switchboard, you probably shared your screen or posted a link in Slack to share content. Now you can simply post what you want to share in the room. You and your clients will appreciate the subtle but powerful shift in behavior to an interactive meeting environment instead of one-way sharing. The room saves everything you add, so you’ll never have to resend links to urls or files.

Pro tip: Use in-room recording to provide an overview your client can watch prior to the meeting.

How will you use your room? Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Review, Feedback, Approval, and Iteration

Say for example, you’re working on a marketing website project. There may be images, copy, and design assets all to be reviewed at once. Simply add the assets to a dedicated section and ask for feedback in comment threads, just like you would on a Figma file or a Google doc. You can work through the feedback live in a meeting or outside of meetings through recordings and comment threads.

You and your client will love being able to do Google docs style commenting in one place, across every type of asset you use. 

Pro tip: Ask AI to proofread PDFs and summarize your notes and files.

Results and insights reporting

Make reporting more engaging by combining multiple tools and inputs in one space. Seeing reports side by side will help the team draw additional insights from your data.

• Marketing: Share insights on advertising and website efficacy from your marketing analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Hotjar.
• Market Research: Add raw source material such as videos and screenshots alongside polished presentations and 3rd party research reports.
• Customer experience: Display retention, bug reports, and customer feedback notes from your CX team.

To create a results and insights room, copy and paste links and files directly onto the room’s canvas. Once you log in, you can fully interact with that tool in Switchboard as you would in your local web browser. 

Start a discussion by @mentioning teammates with questions, comments, and inviting them to add more insights. Invite anyone from the ‘share’ button to join the room.

Moodboards, Inspiration, and Competitive Audits

When you don’t have access to a conference room, you can ‘put it all up on the wall’ in a Switchboard room. Add screenshots, websites, text excerpts and videos onto an interactive canvas. Invite other members to contribute before or during a meeting. 

Pro tip: Create sections to guide the moodboard or audit. For example, you can create a section for “Things we love” and “Things we hate” or “Direct competitors” and “Indirect competitors.”

Workshops

Recreate the feeling of being in a room together. If you’re planning a product launch or campaign, rooms can act like whiteboards on steroids 

• Lay out your agenda in a Notepad
• Add sticky notes and inspiration from your mood board up in the room
• Allow people to sketch ideas visually in TL draw
• Use a timer for time boxing

Before you know it, you’ve got everyone engaged in contributing new ideas on a shared canvas.    

When you work with clients in Switchboard, productivity and creativity go hand in hand. Instead of sharing file links and juggling feedback, you can work together in a common space that organizes every file, app, and image.

Knock their socks off in every interaction
Roll out the red carpet for every client in a dedicated room for collaboration.
Get started

Frequently asked questions:

What applications work in Switchboard?

Any tool that you can use in your browser works in Switchboard. Analytics, CRM, monitoring, email, CMS, chat, blogs and marketing websites…you name it. For your incident response room, you can add monitoring reports, screenshare native IDEs, web analytics, customer reports.Teammates will need the same access they’d normally need to log in and use web tools - but you can grant shared control while you’re in the room together for an ‘over the shoulder’ experience, and you can leave up screenshots and videos of content that require log in to enable broader access. Note: For tools in your org that require log in, you’ll need to log in periodically just like you would normally in your computer’s web browser.

Who has access to the room?

Access is controlled by you. No one can enter the room without you inviting them. You can set the room to only be accessible to a subset of your team OR allow anyone in your workspace to access the room on their own. If needed, you can even allow temporary access to people outside your workspace or in other parts of your org by selecting ‘allow once’ when they try to request access to the room.

How can people ask questions?

Switchboard is made for working together, and there are nearly as many ways of connecting in Switchboard as there are in real life. Similar to a video conference tool, you can ask questions live on video calls or through chat in the room. There are also in-room apps, such as the Open Questions app to record and resolve big questions that your team comes up with in meetings or on their own time. But perhaps the most useful way to ask a question is starting a comment thread on any screenshot, note, and website. Threads are especially useful for tools without built-in comments and public websites.

Can we also use the room for a meeting?

Yes, all rooms are equipped with video conferencing. When you start a call, all of the applications and documents will be there ready to use.

What is a Client Room?

A client room is similar to a conference room, but online (and dare we say better). Imagine a dedicated meeting space where you and your client go, that saves a whiteboard how you left it, pictures up on the walls with your goals and inspiration. Unlike a conference room, you can also add digital apps and files and provide feedback directly on any piece of content. A Client Room in Switchboard helps consolidate your different communication channels, productivity tools, and content into a customizable visual layout that you can come back to and use again and again.

What are the benefits of creating a client room?

A dedicated room will make every client feel like a VIP. You might not be able to wine and dine everyone, but you can engage each client with a custom, collaborative room for all their work. Add docs, files, links, and recordings for easy access to everything during—and between—meetings. Client rooms also help both you and the client stay on top of all the details. With everything related to a client or project in one spot, the whole team has a bird’s-eye view of how work is going. You’ll also be able to move work forward between meetings. Not every client interaction needs to be a meeting. By adding work to client rooms, anyone can jump in at any time to check on work async and move projects forward async—without losing touch.

What type of information is included in a Client Room?

It’s possible to host most of your collaboration in a client room in Switchboard including status meetings, project feedback and handoffs, presentations, results reporting, hosting important resources like contracts or design files. Switchboard helps you keep all of your work organized and accessible.

Knock their socks off in every interaction
Roll out the red carpet for every client in a dedicated room for collaboration.
Get started