The OpenWater Blog

Awards Tips and Tricks: HipChat

We’ve done our fair share of experimenting with different tools, here at OpenWater, to help us provide you with great products and service. We realized that these are tools that you’d find useful as well.

One of the tools integral to our operations is HipChat, a group chat software.

But what is so special about chat software? Isn’t gchat enough? Actually, no. Not even close!

HipChat has substantially increased the efficiency of communication between team members here at OpenWater. Throughout our company, the topic of conversation varies from Support to Onboarding to Marketing and Sales, etc. With this software, you can chat with anyone on your team in any department; either in 1 on 1 chats or private rooms.

HipChat and other team collaboration tools (Like Slack) are great for lowering communication overhead within your organization. Instead of using long email chains, unnecessary conference calls, and meetings, you can start a quick group chat in HipChat that gets everyone together and on the same page.

Here’s a screenshot of HipChat:

HipChat is also conveniently available as a smartphone, web, or desktop app.

Advanced users can integrate HipChat with multiple parts of their other business systems. For example, here at OpenWater, our Intercom.io support system integrates directly with HipChat. This means that any message submitted through Intercom gets copied to our Support chat channel. This allows our support staff to chat about any message that comes in and determine the best way to handle it.

Our favorite feature by far though is the ability to easily copy and paste images and files to HipChat. It’s so much quicker than having to send emails with attachments.

But more importantly, HipChat keeps everyone in the organization connected. You might find people chatting with each other from other departments who under normal circumstances would never meet. Now sales, marketing, support, and developers all have a place to congregate and chat.

If you have an awards committee or team responsible for running multiple aspects of your program at once (marketing, support, single sign on, etc.) — having a place to chat at any time can save hours of effort and communication.

Got questions about your awards program? Just ask us!

Zack Schwartz

Zack is a generalist. His position here changes almost every day. He's been involved in pretty much every sector of the business ranging from sales and marketing to programming and product development. He enjoys being innovative and thinking of new ways to expand and improve the business.

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