Published on September 18, 2017
Welcome to our first edition of Reliable Agency Workflow Improvements 🙂
We’re working on a backlog of the changes we’ve made in previous months, but for now, we thought we’d kick it off with a few substantive updates we’ve made in the past couple weeks.
On Getting Paid
Collecting billing from clients is a tightrope all agencies walk. Even clients with the best intentions often don’t pay right away – delaying projects and project next steps.
???? Messaging enhancement: Clearly tying paying invoices to client goals.
Our belief is that if someone doesn’t do something right away, like pay an invoice, then they haven’t been clearly told why they need to pay it right away.
On Managing Client Expectations
As hard as we try to keep clients happy and projects on track – occasionally we run into friction points. After quite a bit of internal discovery, we formed a hypothesis: Some of our messaging left some clients with expectations we couldn’t — and didn’t want to — match, creating a disconnect we had to resolve before going further.
???? Messaging enhancement: Revising website & emails.
Our PSD to HTML service, while timely, does not claim to be the fastest – we instead strive to be the most thorough and caring in our work, so the end-result is either ready, or very close to it, when we send it to you. (Consequently, because our review/feedback process is much shorter as a result, we often are the fastest.)
There are some things we do quite quickly though, such as proposals, which we turn around in 1 business day with the exception of larger projects.
We’re now going through our website and emails to find any indications of “fast” and make sure we either disclaimer it, or change it to a different message that’s more reflective of us as a whole, such as “accurate” or “thorough.”
On Improving Client Experience (Underway)
We love Teamwork, because as a 25-person team with lots of collaboration at all times, it covers everything we need. But we’ve discovered that many of its features are a bit overkill for our clients, and thus they’re not very inspired to interface with it all that much.
???? Project management app improvements.
A) Eliminating tabs and features for our clients’ view, so they only see the items they’re most interested in.
B) Or, using an entirely different app (or creating our own) to communicate with clients – and just using Teamwork for ourselves.
New Process to Improve All Systems, Every Month
It happened by accident, when an amazing client of ours sent us a email that kindly said:
“We love working with you – but feel you could improve in a couple areas. Can we meet and discuss?”
Can we? Are you kidding – this is exactly the kind of conversation we love having! Tell us how we can get better so we can get better. I loved this client’s bold initiative.
In fact, the entire exec team found this so enlightening that we made it a monthly process that’s now a part of how we do things.
???? Client “What can we do better?” Interviews.
Curious about any of our processes? Inspired to take some action? Leave a reply below and tell us. We’d love to know.
And we’d love to answer your questions, and hear what action you’re going to take. Plus – sharing your action steps with others is a great accountability tool. Let’s keep each other accountable and on track. What do you say? ????
This post was last updated on October 5, 2021
