Continuing on from an earlier post introducing how to think about an approach for paying attention to client satisfaction, I'd like to offer some ideas here on what I've found to be helpful aspects for bringing that approach to life. Monitoring and ensuring client satisfaction is a shared responsibility. For Delivery Excellence to be woven into the way we work requires collaboration, and thus client satisfaction is not just the job of your project manager or sales staff if something goes wrong. It’s a shared responsibility—all team members have a part to play to ensure that continual client satisfaction.
Client Satisfaction Best Practices
Here are some areas to consider in coming up with the approach that’s going to work for your particular client and project team.
Cadence & Constituencies
Decide who to involve and how often to focus in. I’d really encourage an internal steering call—set this up for as often as you have a client-facing status conversation and hold it just prior (e.g.: the afternoon of the day before or morning of). A common mistake is not inviting everyone you need into that tent for that steering discussion; every client touchpoint needs to be at least informed, if not involved, from sales through management, and that’s a key driver of being able to position ourselves to respond proactively vs. reactively. We want to discern and get out in front of risks before they become issues.
Questions to discuss sound like:
- Is the client happy?
- Do they like our communication style?
- Do they seem disgruntled and do we know why?
- If we don’t know why, how do we find out?
Proactive vs. Reactive
Maintain a risk checklist. Our project managers are usually concerning themselves with quantitative risk management… and the classic risk register applies there. In this case, I’m talking about the notion of a qualitative risk management tracking tool. Develop whatever will work internally—it can be as simple as a wiki or notebook page or a more robust spreadsheet. Just make sure everyone has access to it and is informed of updates.
Transparency
As uncomfortable as it may be, we must strive for as much transparency as possible. We usually have the best of intentions and we need to make sure that comes through. During difficult conversations, maintain the context that we’re in this together. Any tough news should be relayed in spirit of partnership—it’s not ‘us vs. them.’ If there is a conflict, it is everyone’s problem as a unified team to work through. So yes, you may need to commit to solving the problem on your end, but you can’t just say it will be fixed in an unrealistic aspirational reassurance.
Relationships
Consider the relationships between your project team members and those on the client side. Stakeholders often gravitate toward and communicate better with different teammates on the service provider side. If you need to get a bit deeper and understand more about a problem candidly or you have to deliver a difficult message, think about who on the team might be the best relationship-wise to take on that conversation on behalf of your team. If someone has earned trust with a particular counterpart on the client side, you'll want to capitalize on that to everyone's benefit.
Tailoring
Lastly, tailor the messaging and interactions. Think about your audience. If you’re dealing with an executive stakeholder vs. a client’s project manager or product owner, think bullets rather than paragraphs. If they're not in the weeds, don't expect them to acclimate to the same level of detail. It’s going to go a long way to making the interactions and communication most efficient and beneficial.