6 steps for success

After 17 years in the industry, it’s time to share our top 6 tips on how we keep clients happy and how importantly , success stems from stability.  Stability in service, in products and providers.

1. Be a partner, not just a product provider 

A client has come to you for a product that you offer, but like a lot of other industries, it is not the product that is most important, but the service. This includes your ‘value-adds’, ie. what you do that makes you unique or stand out from the rest.  This could be offering 100% in-house support and not outsourcing your work, or having an allocated project manager or consistent team that has been doing the same awesome work for many years and knows how to get it right.  All of these attributes and many more, mean a client is more like a partner and that you work together through two-way communication to ensure the product they wanted was everything they expected and more.

2. Ensure transparency, to create trust

Doing so, means that a mistake, doesn’t cause a headache.  Everyone makes mistakes, but being open and honest when you do, can make all the difference.  It helps contribute to that two-way communication mentioned above and ensures further trust in your relationship with your partner/s.  After all, “it’s not how we make mistakes, but how we correct them, that defines us”.  

3. Offer ongoing support

This may be the most important tip we have and the way we have made our own clients very happy!  After launching a project don’t just drop and run. The most important part in the whole project development process is monitoring and evaluation, support and maintenance and security and backups. Without this, it’s fairly likely, that your app or project will not succeed.  You need a team on your side to answer queries, help fix problems and upgrade and update the service as needed, to ensure your efforts do not go to waste! 

4. With support, comes stability

If you have a supportive team, you have a stable team. We believe that success comes from stability and this means having a stable team, stable communication, a stable product and a stable service.  At the end of the day, other qualities can only take you so far, but stability will take you to the end.

5. Be consistent

Consistency will do a myriad of things for you and your business.  Firstly consistency allows accountability because it ensures you have a level of quality and service to live up to, and through this, consistency also allows you to undertake measurement.  This means measuring the effectiveness of your project.  Consistency also allows your business to establish a good reputation (if you’re consistently good of course) and in doing this, you can push and maintain a positive and effective business message.

6. Listen

Don’t listen with the intent to reply, listen with the intent to understand.  You have to listen to your partners if you want to understand why your work is needed and will be of benefit.  This also involves knowing and understanding the market and investing in R&D, so you can add value to the listening.

Let’s be real, from a clients perspective, recruiting to pay a team to do work for your business is hard.  It requires an enormous amount of research, google searches and chatting to colleagues, but at the end of the day it comes down to trust.  If you're a business that can offer a client trust, through a honest , supportive, stable and consistent relationship, you're well on your way to success.