Customer story written by Norm Alger, partner at Xhilarate.
Xhilarate is an experiential branding firm that creates visual brand expressions that engage, excite the senses, and inspire business growth. We are experts in branding, interactive design, immersive storytelling, and cultural engagement. Each of our partners brings over 20 years of branding experience across a range of industries.
We help craft brand stories, create brand expressions, and establish experiential brand connections with our client's employees, customers, and investors.
As we embarked on this journey, we were a small agency with big ideas. We recognized the need for an agile, intuitive, and robust platform for our internal staff, freelancers, and clients.
Get it together, man!
We were literally all over the place - using this app for that and that app for this. With a little digital digging, we discovered ActiveCollab and saw that the organization offered a live virtual feature walkthrough conducted by a representative. After about 15 minutes, it became clear to us that this was just what we needed, and best of all - no ugly duckling factor.
We generally create a new project and assign the client and resources to the initiative. We provide the brief and any supporting documents and invite the appropriate people to jump onboard.
The shoemaker’s children cannot go barefoot
You may be familiar with the adage “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.” This alludes to the fact that we are often so busy providing for our clients, we do not take proper care of ourselves. With this in mind, we are doing our best to create meaningful balance for our talented, hard-working people.
We are in the process of redesigning our website and, like any client initiative, it also has many moving parts. As mentioned before, we track our time just as we would for a client, and leave feedback and assign tasks as we move closer to launch. This has really helped us ensure we’re hitting the target date for our project.
The payoffs are rolling in
We are overjoyed to report that our productivity - both for our teams and our clients - has easily increased 25% by consolidating to this single platform. We are looking to the horizon, and we see a very bright future for our agency.
Because we are a very creative bunch, the simplicity of ActiveCollab allows us to concentrate less on the Microsoft Project-like, BaseCampy, JIRA-style interface and lack of functionality, and more on the tasks-at-hand and strategizing & concepting for our agency and the clients we work with.