Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Working with your clients – The basic in-house rules
As an agency, a good relationship with new and existing clients is the bedrock of our business. Our challenge with new clients is how we communicate with them taking into account the different levels of expertise and expectations we experience with them.
The best and worst-case scenarios have wide chasms of differences to the agency. In the best, a client will have a good understanding of the technologies you utilise (In our case as an Open Source house utilising My SQL and Joomla )as well as understanding how a project is put together.. They would also have clear ideas of the functionality, design and any additional requirements for the site they wish to have built and can clearly deliver and communicate these points to our team.
The opposite of the best case, is of a client who contacts us and states ‘I need a website, how much does it cost?’ They will not have an idea of the design and look they want as well as the functionality they need to best represent their requirements. And this client will not have a clear idea of the complexities to produce a custom made project and the range of costs associated with it.
One would think that an average between these two scenarios would be the norm but that is not necessarily the case. And with all these clients we have to adapt to their needs, work together and ensure the appropriate rules of communication are attributed to the different levels of expertise.
An example is that the ‘expert client’ can be communicated to with an element of industry talk, use of Buzzwords etc.
For the more technically challenged client we believe the ‘Grandmother Test’ is applicable (but never in a patronising way). The basic Grandmother rule is ‘If I explained what we are doing to my Grandmother, would it be understood?’ If yes great, if not more clarification will be required
That said, our approach and working practice to our clients is a whole discussion of its own and will be visited on future articles.
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