Over 90% of staff confirmed that Chatwork has speeded up internal communication very quickly

Mr. Tran Nguyen Trung - Director of I-Glocal Company

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I-Glocal is a tax and accounting consultancy firm, invested by Japan and established in Vietnam in 2003, till now it has been established for 17 years. Starting with the first office in Hanoi and so far we have had 5 offices (in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong Tokyo, and one office in Cambodia) with more than 300 employees and a thousand Japanese customers are investing in Vietnam and Cambodia, mainly in Vietnam.

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The core value of I-Glocal

The core value of I-Glocal has two points. The first important point is aimed at being a platform to support the growth of all our customers.

For a service industry like I-Glocal, the more a customer grows, the more I-Glocal grows. That is a very important point. And a second point is that we value the development of all our partners. Thus, the development of our partners includes two points. One is that partners are not only customers but also employees of our corporation. Employees are very important partners for the long-term growth of the corporation and that is the reason that I-Glocal always strives and promotes the development of all employees.

The competitive advantages of I-GLOCAL

I-Glocal is a corporation providing a general service package for back-office from the time when Japanese businesses research about investment in Vietnam, promote investment, then establish legal entities or representative offices until they don't even invest in Vietnam anymore and they go back to their country, we still support them all. It is called a one-stop service for customers when they invest in Vietnam. These include areas such as investment promotion, taxation, accounting, human resources, and auditing.

I-Glocal has 1000 customers, most of them are Japanese customers which is over 95% of our customers. And among those customers, about 30% to 40% are Japanese companies whose parent company is listed in Japan. The rest are companies although not listed but are leading companies in Japan and some small and medium companies in Japan. They also invest in Vietnam and are also our own customers. The scale and scope of customers are also quite large, there are many industries and many scales. And with such a high number of customers, that is the strength of I-Glocal when working in Vietnam.

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Internal communication - Most common issue in business operation

Mentioning the issue of "internal communication", is also a big challenge for many businesses. Can you share more details about these issues?

In consultancy, there will be two main areas. One is customer communication and the second is internal communication. All industries are quite similar, but especially in consultancy, we only focus on these two areas. Communicating with customers does not take as much time as we think. But sometimes we think the internal communication is quite simple so that we don’t have to care too much, but actually, it costs a lot of money. We have to spend a lot of time, we may have to communicate internally in order to come up with the right advice or solution for the client.

To ensure the communication between the offices in Cambodia, Vietnam and Japan operate smoothly, we used to use email a lot in the past, (also apply for communicating with external customers), but it is quite time- consuming and sometimes the processing speed is quite slow.

It also requires (despite internal communication) confidentiality. Because the information in the consultancy industry is so important. Our asset is only client information and if this information is not kept confidential, it is very dangerous. Based on these things, in order to increase efficiency as well as speed and still ensure security, after researching for a long time, I finally decided to choose the Chatwork tool to use in our company from about a year ago.

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Chatwork assists to speed up internal communication very quickly and smoothly

How do we know about Chatwork?

It was introduced by our partners. After researching, I found that Chatwork is used by many Japanese companies. And in terms of security, this is a solution for corporations, it differs from solutions for individuals.

Another point is that Chatwork is from Japan, so lean management is emphasized. No flashy, no colorful, very minimalistic, and easy to use.

How did I-Glocal name the groups to facilitate the management of hundreds of chat groups with hundreds of different projects?

One of I -Glocal’s characteristics is that we have many projects to manage, and I do not want to name them too complicated. Usually, there are three groups.

One is for each department, the general information will be in this group. The second one is for each project. Depending on the scale of the project, the number of employees will vary. However, I will divide the internal management and internal communications by each project.

Thirdly, some important information and some announcements for the entire office are put in special chat groups. It is very simple. The name is also easy to understand. This is consulted by the Chatwork support team, then I know how to name chat groups to be easy to understand and easy to find.

Office at I-GLOCAL

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The change brings a noticeable effect

At the end of December last year, I started testing Chatwork and started using it officially about 1 year ago. In terms of efficiency, there are two main points that I found.

The first is that internal communication is much faster compared to using email. Even though our employee replies to email is also extremely fast. However, when we use Chatwork, it is much faster and helps reduce unnecessary information during communication.

The second thing is that it is very easy to find the chat history, the previous information exchanged and the documents shared in each project. One more point, there were a very large number of projects and small tasks to do, although we had other tools to manage projects. Therefore, now to assign tasks to each employee, we use Chatwork so that our employees can follow immediately on the Chatwork screen which needs to be done and when the deadline is. It is very clear.

Thanks to this assignment, I will ensure that the task will be completed fully and on time. In addition, another characteristic of some consultancy firms is that the staff rotation of each project can be quite a lot.

So the work handover between former members and new members is very vital. Before sometimes I had to explain everything from the beginning, now just by using Chatwork, I can just say “OK, you can join and read the chat group from the beginning, read in a very clear way who did what and what is the current situation of the project ”, so the handover is quite light and adequate.

I-GLOCAL staff using Chatwork

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The difference in Chatwork

Before using Chatwork, I had researched some similar tools. However, these free tools are only for individuals, not for businesses. They do not guarantee security and they are not sure about security.

The second one is that there are also some tools from big American companies. However, it is not very suitable for such a consultancy firm's environment like ours. Its usage is a bit complicated and managing groups or managing information is sometimes a bit difficult for our staff. I also tried to use Chatwork and this famous American tool at the same time and then after three months, I would decide which tool to choose. Finally, after surveying everyone's opinion, our company decided to choose Chatwork because it is so simple and easy to use.

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Digital transformation - a breakthrough opportunity for business

Many businesses have chosen digital transformation as well as a technological breakthrough to change their appearance and grasp great opportunities. According to you, how do you assess the opportunities when you go together with Chatwork to become a pioneer in digital technology?

I think nowadays all industries have to apply digital technology to enhance work efficiency. Now, Robots can do a lot of things, not just robots in factories, but robots in offices also have evolved a lot. It has increased the competitiveness of many businesses when they apply. I also promote the application of digital technology. There are mainly two areas.

One is that it is very important to improve the productivity of the work, what is not necessary must be immediately eliminated. In addition, traditional communication can sometimes make mistakes, or sometimes fail to finish deadlines then affect the whole project. I would like to solve this problem by using Chatwork, as well as some tools in using technology to improve the management capacity of my business.

Thank you so much for your honest comments. I hope the I-Glocal tax and accounting consulting group grows stronger and stronger.