Greenice is a web development agency that specializes in developing custom feature-rich apps and websites with a complex back-end. Their story started in 2007 with two freelancers that decided to join their forces. Now they are a team of 35 people with a portfolio of hundreds of projects and clients from around the world.

We spoke to Kateryna from Greenice about her team’s experience with adopting Fleep and bringing all work communications to one place.

Read on, if you’d like!

Convenience of having all work-related contacts in one place

Before Fleep, the Greenice team was using another messenger that got discontinued. One of their project managers then researched team chats and found Fleep. He suggested using it instead of the discontinued messenger and they never looked back!

Now, the entire Greenice team is using Fleep, as well as some of their contractors. For example, they communicate with their designers and accountants on Fleep. “It is very convenient to have all work-related contacts in one place.” says Kateryna. We agree!

Organizing work communications

“Losers have goals. Winners have systems.”
― Timothy Ferriss, “Tools of Titans“

There is no one single way to organize your work communications in Fleep. But we have found that having dedicated conversations for different recurring topics is what works for everyone. The Greenice team is no exception in this. Let’s take a look at the setup that works well for them.

The Greenice Fleep setup has a few general conversations for everyone in the team. For example, there’s a conversation named “Official”. Kateryna explains: “It is for letting everyone know if you are going to be late or unavailable at some time period.” Another general conversation is “Talks”, a group conversation for all informal conversations about anything and everything.

In addition to the general team conversations, Greenice has created group conversations for everyone who share responsibilities. So, they have conversations named “Sales”, “Project Managers”, “Team Leaders” and so on.

Favorite features

All teams have their favorite functionalities for work communication. Let’s dive into Greenice’s favorite Fleep features now.

First and foremost, the team loves pinned messages. “We pin files that are commonly used and messages with information that we know we will need to refer to later,” Kateryna explains.

Our “seen-by“s are another favorite that many other work communications tools miss. Kateryna says: “We love being able to see who has already read a message.” We agree. Sometimes such a small thing is a key part of communication.

Other functionalities that the Greenice team highlighted: @mentions — “Tagging people is useful when you need to call attention to a particular person”. Some of their team members also use the Monologue functionality to take notes and most all of them like the ability to react with emojis to messages.

What matters in choosing a work communications tool

How do you choose the tools that you use every day? Sometimes, it’s a rational decision, sometimes it’s emotion and sometimes it’s completely random.

Besides the features listed above, the Greenice team is pretty unanimous about liking Fleep for its simple interface. “It is intuitive and easy to find your way around right away,” says Kateryna. Now you’re making us blush!

We also asked Kateryna how we fare against our competition. After all, there are a lot of messengers for work communication out there. We will leave you with what she said:

“Compared to mainstream messengers like Skype, Google Hangouts, Whatsapp, etc., Fleep allows for a much better organization and separation of personal and work contacts.

Compared to team messengers, it has the best price-quality ratio. And Fleep also works with Linux really well.”

Further Reading:

• How to Improve Team Communication: The Ultimate Guide
• Adduco Makes Internal Communication 2X Faster With Fleep
• 14 Team Communication Quotes to Inspire Your Team

The post Greenice Brings All Work Communications To One Place With Fleep appeared first on Fleep Blog.

Aivar’s instincts proved correct. Today, Adduco enjoys a central platform for its team’s communication resulting in 2X faster responses and transparent communication.

Seeking a Better Way to Communicate

Adduco has established itself as a professional moving service. With more than 10 years of experience in the field, they offer moving services for individuals and businesses, heavy duty moves, furniture assembly as well as storage services.

Coordinating a relocation relies on communication — coordinating 1000 relocations a month requires well-organized, effective communication.

The company has a team of project managers in the office, and moving specialists who are constantly on the go. Aivar explains that the company has come a long way in improving its internal communications:

“Our internal team communication used to be disorganized. We had one Facebook group conversation for all the office workers, and a mix of text messages, calls, emails and random Facebook Messenger conversations on top of that.”

The main downside of this chaos was that any piece of information was difficult to track down later.

“Often, you’d have to skim through all the different channels to find that one piece of information you were looking for.”

Another major bugbear for the company was that everyone was included in the one group conversation. So everyone was involved in every discussion — when that was not necessary or really helpful.

At home, Aivar heard how his spouse’s company uses a centralized team chat platform to organize their work communications. So, Aivar decided to introduce Fleep to the company.

Introducing Fleep for Organized Communication

Moving services involve a lot of coordination  One of Aivar’s favorite features of Fleep is the possibility to set up several team conversations around different facets of the business. This allows focused conversations around the topics.

“We set up separate conversations around the different topics. We use them for discussion as well as for managing tasks related to the topics. In this way, information is well-organized and our internal communication is systematic.”

So, for example, the team that stays in the office has organized their internal communication around the following topics:

• Car fleet & its upkeep
• Team & hiring
• Meetings coordination
• Mishaps and accidents on-site
• Lunch
• Offtopic
• Warehouse

The communication between the office workers and the movers happens primarily in the following channels:

• General info & updates
• Project managers & Drivers

Fleep is also great for sharing information quickly, when it’s necessary. Every mover has a 1:1 conversation with their direct manager, where information is shared.

“When the movers run into any obstacles on-site, they can send a picture to the project managers in a matter of seconds. Before Fleep, this was done over email, which is a way clunkier channel for such quick communication.”

For the Project Managers, Fleep provides an overview of the current relocations, allowing them to coordinate the logistics around them.

“They share and receive the details of different relocations on Fleep, so they have one place where they have an overview of all current jobs.”

The movers also use Fleep to coordinate their own communication.

“The movers use Fleep to agree on the time and place for when they meet on the day of the move. Earlier, this happened over several text messages and calls.”

Read more: How to Improve Team Communication

Dedicated Conversations for International Relocations

Adduco’s project managers also share all guidelines and information related to international relocations in Fleep. Everyone who needs to know the details is included in the conversation, and can access the details whenever they need to.

“Most local relocations do not need a dedicated Fleep conversation, as all the details are simply shared in a detailed Excel sheet. However, all bigger projects that span weeks, and all international relocations do get a dedicated Fleep conversation. There’s a lot of information that needs to be exchanged.”

Previously, the details instructions for international relocations were written in the form of a Word document, and shared over email. Now, the guidelines are shared in Fleep, and pinned to the conversation’s pinboard.

So, everyone involved in the relocation can easily access it, ask questions and give feedback in the dedicated conversation.

“In this way, we avoid getting the same questions from different people, as the conversation around the move is transparent. Communication does not happen in silos and information does not get stuck.”

Moving Beyond Communication: Collaboration

In addition to team-wide communication and cross-team communication, Adduco also makes use of Fleep’s collaboration features — tasks and pins.

Tasks are mainly used by the office workers, who create and assign quick tasks to each other, and mark them as fulfilled when appropriate.

“When a Project Manager has to send a car for repairs, this is set up as a task for him or her on Fleep. When the car has been repaired, they will mark the task as done. Similarly, this is used for client calls. So, you can create a task with a phone number and details, assign it to the appropriate person — and then it will be their responsibility to make the call.”

Pinned messages are used for highlighting important information, or whenever there are guidelines that should be easily found.

“For example, the guidelines of an international relocation will be pinned in the respective conversation, where they can easily be found. Other times, details about an event everyone’s welcome to will be pinned in the general conversation’s pinboard.”

Efficient, Fast and Convenient Team Communication

Before using Fleep, Adduco spent at least twice as much time on communication, as it was scattered around different channels that are not well suited for work communication — email, text messaging and Facebook Messenger.

“Sending and reading emails is time-consuming and burdensome for team communication, especially when it involves pictures and files as attachments. And there’s no way to tell whether the other person has seen the information you sent over via email. Making a call is quick and easy, but it’s a very intrusive way of communicating and there’s no way to make sure that the other person also remembers or takes action on the information you gave them over a phone call. Text messaging and Facebook Messenger are private communication channels, making them inappropriate for work conversations.”

Adduco’s team was skeptical that Fleep would help them with all of these communication challenges. But a trial of Fleep showed them how the right tool can help make internal communication faster and more efficient.

Since it started using Fleep, Adduco has seen a massive boost to its internal communication.

“We did a little survey about our internal communication before starting to use Fleep and once we had been using Fleep for 1.5 months. All of our team members agreed that our communication became faster and more efficient after we started using Fleep.“

To conclude, Aivar says:

“We’d recommend Fleep to all companies that wish to improve their internal communication and the efficiency of sharing information internally.”

Further Reading:

• How to Improve Team Communication: The Ultimate Guide
• Team Communication Strategies of top CEOs and Leaders
• 14 Team Communication Quotes to Inspire Your Team

The post Adduco Makes Internal Communication 2X Faster With Fleep appeared first on Fleep Blog.

ESTCube-2 is a space technology demonstration mission to test a “plasma brake” for deorbiting satellites and to test electric sail propulsion technology.

The people behind the mission are mostly students who are united by the shared passion of space exploration. And there’s many of them!

When the first Estonian satellite ESTCube-1 united more than 100 students, ESTCube-2 satellite has already brought together about 200 students from many different fields of study. And they collaborate on Fleep!

We spoke to Kadri from the ESTCube-2 team about how and why they use Fleep for their project communication. So, here’s the ESTCube-2 Fleep user story!

Yay, thanks for sharing the ESTCube-2 Fleep User Story! You can find all featured user stories under the Fleep User Stories category. Make sure you also follow Fleep on Twitter and Facebook to keep an eye on our news and updates!

The post Fleep User Story: ESTCube-2 appeared first on Fleep Blog.

This time, our user story features PlanetX, a full service web agency. The PlanetX team designs and builds websites, applications, mobile solutions and other awesome digital media.

We spoke to Keval Kankotiya, co-founder of PlanetX, about how and why they use Fleep for their project communication. Without further ado, here’s the PlanetX Fleep user story…

How did you find out about Fleep?

Hello from PlanetX! We are a creative IT agency and we were spending lot of time behind making task lists and sending it through email and project management systems.

We were looking for something that can save our time and keep track of each and every small task so that we don’t miss anything.

We tried several messengers like Skype, Hipchat and Slack in the past but all of them have some limitations. Slack was promising somehow but the pricing was high for our team of 30+ members worldwide and continuously adding more day by day.

I was reading Quora and suddenly I found a question about Slack alternatives. Boom – this is how it all started!

“I went to the Fleep website and checked the features – surprisingly it is exactly what we were looking for.”
— Keval Kankotiya

How do you use Fleep?

We are a team of 30 people spread worldwide – India, USA, Australia and Germany. We use Fleep as our general internal team communications tool for our remote team.

What do you like about Fleep?

“I am more than happy with Fleep, it is the perfect messenger especially for IT agencies. It is super flexible and easy to use.”

Fleep has everything that we need – like functionality to create tasks, pin important notes, multiple and fast file attachment, easy and smart commands, unlimited history and nice shortcuts.

What could be improved in Fleep?

When I first found out Fleep does not have a Linux app, that was a bummer. We are an IT company and some of our team members use Linux…

So I asked Fleep Support about it (P.S. their support is excellent and they respond very quickly!) and I got the response that they are building a Linux app, to be launched soon!

Fleep works on any web browser though, so currently our Linux team members are using it on the web browser. But we are looking forward to seeing the Linux app ASAP. :)

Edit: Since publishing this article, we have released Fleep for Linux.

Anything else?

In the end I will say BIG GO for Fleep if you want to save time and to have efficient messaging. Happy Fleeping! :)

Woohoo, thanks Keval for sharing the PlanetX Fleep User Story! You can find all featured user stories under the Fleep User Stories category. Make sure you also follow Fleep on Twitter and Facebook to keep an eye on our news and updates!

The post Fleep User Story: PlanetX appeared first on Fleep Blog.

(From left to right:) Yiannis, Jason, Budi and Tim from Heroic.

This time, we are featuring Heroic—an independent record label and management agency based in the Netherlands. Heroic was founded by Budi Voogt and Tim van Doorne in 2013.

The goal and ethos of Heroic is ‘Empowering Creators’—and they really take this to heart. Heroic strives to give the power back to the artist and provide resources to help empower all acts to be as independent as possible. This is why Budi wrote ‘The Soundcloud Bible’ and the ‘Music Marketing Academy’ and Tim recently wrote the ‘Mastering Bible’.

In fact, Heroic is much more than a record label – they are building a positive and forward-thinking community, an ecosystem where super-talents can flourish. Not to namedrop, but the artists they work with include San Holo, Ark Patrol, Fytch and soupandreas, for example.

“We challenge convention and leverage the internet to build sustainable careers for our artists.
By wearing the kamon, the ancient Japanese symbol used to identify a family, we show our resolve.” – Heroic

We spoke with Yiannis Karavassilis from Heroic about why and how they use Fleep. Without further ado, here’s the Fleep user story of Heroic!

How did you find out about Fleep?

We had tried using plenty of other team chat software before. We always found some issues with them, whether that was functionalities that weren’t useful, pricing points that didn’t make sense or features that were missing.

“After doing some research we found Fleep and we immediately fell in love with how user-friendly it is: how easy it is to navigate, create teams and engage with our team and artists.”

Why does the Heroic Records team use Fleep?

Our team currently consists of 12 people, located all around the world. The core team of 6 is based in the Netherlands, and the rest of the team is located in various states in the USA and Canada.

Fleep has become our prime means of communication to update each other, exchange files quickly, talk strategy and even have personal one-on-one conversations.

“Even more, it has also become a portal for us to work and communicate with our artists. In this, Fleep has really helped ignite a sense of community among the team and our artists. We all feel more connected than we could have ever been without Fleep.”

Fleep is also great for having everything in one place, centralized, so we do not have to scour through hundreds of conversations on Facebook Messenger.

How does your team use Fleep?

We split our communication into different teams, and then have conversations for different topics. For example, we have a “Label Group” team with conversations for Marketing, Music Discovery, Design etc.

We also have a main / general conversation that we’ve named “The Empire”—our whole team and all artists can see this one—there, everyone can post new music, key marketing highlights and engage with the community.

What do you like about Fleep?

I love how easy it is to share files within Fleep, everything is just a drag and drop away. Navigating within conversations to find keywords is amazing as well. As an A&R (Artist & Repertoire) I get sent a lot of demos daily from our artists to review.

I tend to give a lot of feedback to our artists which creates very lengthy conversations, making it harder to just quickly pull up the demo that some might have sent a few days or a week before. With a simple search I can type in the key word and it will pop up immediately. Love it!

What are your Fleep tips?

Command + G is GOD! Makes my life so much easier to navigate through all my conversations and quickly pull out the conversation with a team-mate or artist I want to talk with.

Who would you recommend Fleep to?

“I would recommend Fleep to any company that’s looking for a very solid solution for a work chat environment.”

I think one thing we really love about Fleep is that all of its main functionality is free. As a startup, it’s  sometimes hard to find the funds to allocate to the software you use, especially when you want to prioritize paying your employees (and artists in our case).

Fleep functions as well (if not better) as other chat for teams we tried out where pricing was off the roof. Customer service is great and friendly, and the whole platform really helps create a wonderful culture.

Yay, thank you for sharing the Heroic Fleep User Story, Yiannis! You can find all featured user stories under the Fleep User Stories category. Make sure you also follow Fleep on Twitter and Facebook to keep an eye on our news and updates!

The post Fleep User Story: Heroic appeared first on Fleep Blog.