This Chat App Is Way Better Than Email For Work

Most of the tools we use for communication at work simply aren't that great.

Email can feel overwhelming. Messages that don't feel that important can build up until unread messages can number in the dozens, or worse - and then, the task seems too daunting for reading through to be worth it.

Chat rooms are great for communicating with a team in real-time, but most aren't great for dealing with the various kinds of documents that professionals might have to deal with on any given day.

For instance, let's say you're working on a big report that involves making a ton of notes on documents too complex for something like Google Drive. You've got too many images to comment on, too much text that has to go through a series of drafts to keep passing around a word file with annotations.

At many companies, people are allowed to work from home or have offices across town or even across the country. If you can't talk about things with people in person, the tools most of us use just aren't that great for getting that feeling that you're engaged in a conversation with you colleagues.

In a recent demo, Convo founder and CEO Faizan Buzdar showed me the approach his company is taking to making online communication at work feel the same as pointing out the changes you'd like to make on a physical draft of something to the person sitting next to you in the office:

For really complex documents, Convo has different tools for annotating different aspects of the documents. Want the wording of a sentence changed in the middle of a long PDF? It lets you highlight it. Think the new logo shown 70 pages in should be blue instead of green? You can point a big arrow at it and a link the comments will let your coworkers go straight to it.

Since you quickly tap through what people are talking about and instantly see exactly what people are talking about - on your computer or phone - it doesn't take long to catch up on everything you need to know.

It works so well for pointing out specific points of concern that Convo uses its app to provide customer support for all of their customers. Each group using it can point out features they need help with or problems they experience and get a quick response.

Convo makes it easy for most teams to try out its apps. Unless you're signing up an entire company for the service, you can probably get away with using the free service until you've decided whether or not you want to pay up.