The Responsible Client
Once upon a time there was a client named Jim. Jim held a middle-management position in a large company that dealt with automotive sales for the better part of 7 years. During this time he came up with ideas to better improve the company that weren’t heard because of its size. He figured that moving the almost archaic way of operating the company into a more practical modern web operation would decrease thousands of dollars spent every year in overhead costs and allow for better interaction with clients.
Frustrated and seeing a market that was unsatisfied with a subpar product, Jim set out to scratch his own itch. Not having much technical experience besides the few computer courses he took in high school and general use of the Windows PC he’d been given at work, he started gathering information on what he would need to build this application.
After various Google searches and conversations with colleagues, friends, and family, Jim decided to take the savings he’d put aside and put it into starting his dream company. Through these conversations, he ended up finding the team that would do all his design work through a close friend, and the team that would be handling all core functionality of the site through an ad he’d posted online.
Jim met with both teams and signed off all of their appropriate paperwork and sat back with a nice cold one excited that he’d finally taken the plunge.
Yet every morning he opened his emails to be more and more discouraged with what wasn’t there.
Thinking he would find himself happy about taking the bull by the horns, Jim found himself getting overly frustrated with the teams he was working with. It seemed that with every passing week he had higher and higher expectations of what was to be done, and more and more was coming out of his savings with little improvement with what had been done.
Jim’s friends reminded him that “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, but he expected more from teams he was paying to get the job done. Not only that, the designs being given to him were less and less of what he wanted. He expected the job done one way, but it seemed to be done another. He found himself in an endless cycle of confusion as the team he’d assembled threw more and more requests at him that he didn’t understand.
With little direction, he ended up realizing that he needed to trust the team he was working with, and upon completion of the project had a product that got the essence of what he wanted done, but was missing key elements he wanted to use as selling tools.
The Moral
Jim ended up getting a product he wasn’t happy with after months of waiting around on other people doing things. Having left his full-time job, and spending most of his savings, he was a very unhappy client. Now, the design and functionality might have been awesome and everyone could have done a kick-ass job, but since Jim wasn’t pleased with it, he couldn’t sell the application properly.
Basically: Jim wasn’t told what his responsibilities were as the client, and he got lost in the mess of things not knowing how to properly get his points across. While it may seem as though this is Jim’s fault for not communicating properly, the blame should be pinned on the teams for not explaining the process to him properly.
We’ve been talking for years now about educating clients about the work we do so that there is more value to our services, but I think our industry is missing a huge part in our teachings.
Clients simply don’t know what to do, or what to expect.
Why is it that when we brief clients we explain to them all the things they will be delivered, but we don’t explain to them what their expectations are and what their role and responsibilities as a client are? Sure, we tell them we’ll give progress updated as the work is completed to get their thoughts – but what does that mean to a non-technical business owner?
As professionals in our industry, it would be silly of us to expect our clients to find out what sort of feedback we’re looking for. Why create that extra step for them in an experience we all claim to be laid back? It seems we’re all playing the part as rockstars that our titles claim us to be quite literally through being overly egotistic in what we do.
If we are to value our work a certain way, we need to also value our client’s role in our work just as much. Once we start realizing this and start acting on creating less confusion (to which most clients may not realize is there in the first place), we’ll be guaranteed an ounce less stress and a heck of a lot more success. Sure, there will still be those clients from hell, but at least we’ll know we’ll have done our part to weed out the smart ones!