Forget What You Were Told: Be Transparent With Your Clients
If you’re a designer and ventured outside of product design for a singular app, or if you’ve freelanced for clients, you know the challenges of working with them. However, did you know there is a great way to alleviate that challenge or down right eliminate it all together? In this segment, I want to touch base on how Mossio works with clients, and how our transparency has helped engage more trust in larger projects and company decisions.
So How Transparent Can I Be?
Over the year that Mossio has been running shop, we’ve learned a thing or two about what to reveal to clients and what to hold back. It’s important to know the boundaries so that clients do not overstep their role in the project. We like to show the clients anything that relates to progress. This can be as simple as giving them chat access to internal tools you might use such as Slack. Having just a small amount of transparency can do wonders for your relationships. Afterall, these clients are spending a pretty penny for your services, it’s best not to leave them in the dark.
Show em the Tasks
Here at Mossio, we use Trello for our task management. We’re working on fairly large projects, so this helps keep our to-do list in perspective. We invite all clients, and all individuals on the client side team to view, edit and create cards (tasks) inside of Trello. We mainly do this so that clients can see what is currently on deck, what is next, and what is ready for their review. This gives them confidence in knowing that the project is progressing in a forward direction, and also allows them to feel involved. We work very closely with our clients, and their feedback and involvement in any project is critical. Our Trello boards are the heartbeat of the management.
So if you’re using a project management system (which if you’re working on any project at any capacity you should be) invite your client, their team and any decision makers to it, so they can see what is going on, and they will feel comfortable in their decision to hire you.
Chatty Cathy
Communication is absolutely necessary in any project, large or small. Without it, you’re dead in the water from the start. With that said, it’s vital to provide your clients a way to communicate with you or your team. At Mossio, we shy away from email communications after projects start unless they are offline conversation worthy. We do this for a few reasons, but the number one reason is so we can keep everything on the table and transparent. If you’re using a chat client such as Slack or HipChat, you might want to think about inviting your client, their team and any decision maker to the channel. You can have simply one off communications, provide feedback, and other really awesome things like Giphy!
Inviting your clients to a chat room or channel will help them feel at ease knowing that they can connect with you anytime they need. However, in order for this to be successful, you need to lay some ground rules (yup, everyone has them) which we will talk about in just a second.
What is also good about chat rooms, is the ability to setup bots. For example, with Slack, you can setup integrations with Trello. So when any team Member does any action with any task on Trello, it will auto notify the client channel with the action. This will directly update the client automatically, in return making them feel more at ease. The good part about it is, you don’t have to take time out of your already busy day to let them know what is going on.
The Development Cycle
If you’re running an agency that also helps clients with development or you’re a freelancer and have a development process in place, great! We’re sure you’re using something like Github or BitBucket to store your code. If you’re not, do that stat! If you are, invite your clients to their repo. They can see what is being done, and even participate if they are tech savvy or if you’re working directly with their engineering team.
This also goes back to having chat tools, and your clients invited. You can setup bots or integrations that when something happens in Github such as a push, or pull request, it will auto update the chat room with the task at hand. Again, a great way to be transparent with your clients to make them feel involved, more at ease and happy with their decision to hire you.
The Ground Rules
So we’ve covered a bit of material, and we’re sure you get the point by now. Being transparent is a great way to work with clients. It helps grow confidence in your clients, and builds trust for longer relationships. However, there have to be some rules so that you keep your sanity.
Business Hours: Make sure your clients know your business hours. Most clients are respectable to business hours but to be sure you’re not getting hit up at 2 in the morning, it might be a good idea to establish that early on.
Chat Junk: It’s important to know that the chat rooms shouldn’t be filled with a bunch of things off topic, or a slew of feedback. There are great web apps such as Invision that provide amazing feedback tools. Chat rooms should be an effective communication tool and not abused.
No Abuse: When giving access to clients like this, you have to be careful to ensure that they do not abuse their power. Make sure they’re not creating tons of tasks to throw off deliverable dates, or changing code without talking with your team first, or anything that could hinder the project’s forward movement in any way. A great way to ensure this is by having a process. We’ve covered this on a previous post.
Transparency Equals Awesome
So hopefully, you’ll take away at the very least is that it’s important to be transparent with your clients. The more transparent you are, the better your relationship with them will be.
