Use Join.Me to Train Staff and Collaborate with Customers

Posted in Tools, Web Design • 475 days ago • Written by Ryan Taft • 3 Comments

Do you manage a website or a blog? Do you build websites for customers? If so, then you know all that’s involved in getting your staff up to speed with tasks that need to be accomplished for the website. You know what’s involved in showing customers how their project is coming along. It’s a lot of work… especially when most of the time your staff is working remotely and your clients are miles away. In this article we are going to show you an online tool that can help make your life much easier. We will go over what it is and what it does, its benefits, how you can use it to make your life easier, and show you how to use it!

What is Join.me?

Join.me is a screen sharing tool. Join.me easily allows users to share what’s being done on their screen with others. Screen sharing tactics help your listeners understand what you’re talking about by providing visual support to back up what’s being discussed. It’s a great tool for collaborating with staff or freelancers. Need to train a client on a new piece of software or show them progress on the website you’re developing for them? Done. Join.me is a quick and dirty tool that allows you to share your screen with anyone at any time. It’s definitely worthwhile to know about, especially for those situations where you didn’t take time to set up some of the more complex screen sharing software programs and you just need to quickly share your screen with someone. Hop on join.me within seconds.

How to Use join.me

The reason we are profiling join.me over its competitors is because of how easy it is to use. It takes literally less than a minute to start sharing your screen with someone. The first time I heard about join.me I was on a weekly conference call with my client. He was trying to explain something to me, but couldn’t quite put it into words. All of a sudden he blurted out, “join me”. I’m like, “I thought I already had… we’ve been discussing this for 20 minutes”. He said, “no, no go to join.me and enter this code”. I did. Seconds later I was looking at his screen. It was pretty incredible how quickly we synched up like that.

To start a meeting simply:

• Click the “Share” button (you will have to download the software upon the first use)
• Send the conference code that pops up to anyone you’d like to join you
• Your attendees simply input the conference code in the “Join” text box on Join.me
• Let the screen sharing begin!

It really is that easy. It takes seconds to get started.

Train Staff with Join.me

Many website owners outsource some aspect of their website development or upkeep to freelancers. Others work with staff who may not be in the same office. Join.Me is a great tool for website designers to use to explain projects and tasks that others need to complete for their website. For example, say you need a design element of your website updated, but your designer works remotely. You call her to try to explain what you want done to the website and where on the site it should be created, but it takes awhile for her to visualize exactly what you’re trying to tell her. Now think about that same example but along with you verbally explaining what you want accomplished, you can couple that with visually demonstrating to her what you want done and where it should go on the website. You can do this easily with join.me’s screen sharing technology.

Collaborate with Customers with join.me

Not only can join.me be a great tool to use internally, but it can also be a great way to collaborate with customers. Obviously getting face time with your customers is critical, but for a lot of us, customers aren’t always located nearby. Therefore tools like join.me can come in very handy when you need to demonstrate something online to someone who’s not in the same physical location as you. Say you’re building a customer a website and she wants to know how things are progressing. You could just email her a link to the DEV site and let her navigate around. We all know how that usually turns out… 13,353 questions come back about why “this link isn’t working” or “how come you used red here instead of blue”, etc. Instead, why not invite her to join you on join.me and show her around the site yourself?

By using join.me with customers you can answer many of their questions and concerns before they even ask them because they can get both a visual and verbal explanation of what you did and why you did it. For me, using join.me with customers is a no brainer. It doesn’t take any extra time, and in fact probably saves time in the long-run. It also creates a more valuable experience for the customer, which only benefits your relationship with that customer in the long-run.

Benefits of Using join.me

As you have probably gathered from the information above, there are a lot of great benefits to using a free screen sharing tool like join.me. Here are a few more:

• It’s quick and easy to use
• Multiple people can view your screen at once
• Setup is simple
• There is no setup for viewers
• You can access a conference call number that you can send folks who are not in front of a computer
• It’s FREE
• It’s great for training and collaborating with employees, freelancers, and customers
• It provides people with a visual description to match the verbal information they are receiving

Using join.me

Will you use join.me? Have you used screen sharing tools in the past? Which ones have you liked? Which ones will you stay away from? There are a lot of great screen sharing tools out there, but not many of them are as easy to use as join.me. It really is an easy process for both the demonstrator and the viewer. Join.me can provide website owners and website developers with a lot of benefits when it comes to training and collaborating. Leave your comments below to let us know which screen sharing tools you’ve used and if you will try join.me. For those of you who have used join.me, please let us know what your experience has been with it.