10 startup tools you need for CRM, communication, and documentation

Stephen Jagger is the co-founder of PayrollHero.com, a time, attendance, scheduling, HRIS, analytics and payroll platform built for the web and mobile.

At PayrollHero we are big believers in knowledge sharing. From pair programming to private online forums for open discussions about our business to sharing online, we believe that transparency and leaving artifacts behind is the best way to succeed. So in keeping with that, I’d like to share ten cool tools we are using today at PayrollHero.

Communication

HipChat – We use HipChat as our water cooler. We have multiple rooms set up so that we can keep the conversations on topic. From business development to developers to customer service, each department of our business has a room to chat in. Plus, with the iOS app and alerts, our team can stay up to speed with the progress of the business. One of the neat things about HipChat is that you can integrate with other tools so that they update the HipChat rooms. For example, in our developers room, it is common to see messages from Bugsnag, GitHub, CodeClimate and many others. In the customer service room, Zendesk and Intercom contacts show up. It is a great way to keep on top of your business and the different departments.

Google Hangouts – Every morning at 7:37am PHT and 3:37pm PDT, most of our team gathers for our standup meetings. Because we are situated in two locations, we do our meeting via Google Hangouts. Hangouts is stable, reliable and free, enabling us to keep both offices in constant contact with each other. Outside of our standup meetings, Google Hangouts are commonly used for department meetings, client support calls, and sales calls.

Skype – Everyone should know Skype, but we use it quite a bit as some Google products have trouble in China. Skype enables our client happiness team to speak with clients, share their screens, and demo the platform. Our business development team uses it for webinars as well as sales calls. Overall it is a reliable platform that helps grow our business.

Asana – Asana is a task tracking system built for web and mobile. It is designed to reduce email clutter within a workplace.  We use it for tracking our engineering tasks, onboarding tasks, and any group projects we are working on.

Zopim – We switched over from SnapEngage to Zopim for the live chat on all of our marketing sites recently. We made the switch based on features and pricing and found that Zopim had all the features we needed at a lower cost that what we were paying before (Zendesk just purchased Zopim).