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.

I think we all get the importance of trying to maintain positive client relationships. It’s a key part of this concept called Delivery Excellence. Especially in a consulting relationship, there’s really a difference between work product check-ins and statuses vs. “how is the relationship?” and “is value being delivered?”

Thinking about client satisfaction means considering (and keeping a pulse on) how your clients feel about working with you and your organization; not just after the project is over, but starting where we first pick up the ball and periodically throughout.

Teams are usually pretty good at understanding if we’re on track with the work itself that we’re tasked with doing, but often we’re not as good at picking up on how the collaboration toward those technical outcomes is working well or if we’re falling short of expectations (and not communicating enough along the way.) So, trying to keep these goals in mind can really help to avoid issues and cultivate some positive capital in case something does start to go awry… so we can better address it together.

Client Satisfaction Approach

So let’s talk about what this looks like generally. Of course, every project and client is different, but you'll need a plan for trying to get that feedback and another for how to do something with the feedback.

In line with the idea that we don’t want to wait until the end to become aware of these concerns, think about the ways you could bake in the feedback opportunities across your engagement. That could involve being very deliberate about creating those opportunities. Sometimes we need to try and elicit both the good as well as the not-so-good feedback when it’s not-so-obvious. I’d really like to emphasize: if you’re asking for this information, you have to be prepared for whatever answers come back; not only for what you want to hear.

You’ll then need to be able to talk about what you’re going to do with the feedback. It’s not going to be enough to just nod and be appreciative for your client’s candor. As project teams and delivery organizations, we need to:

• track it
• agree and assign ownership for it
• follow up on it (amongst yourselves and with the client)

Following up will involve reporting back on progress towards change, improvements, or any other actions. These may be internally managed only, but in a lot of cases, there are going to be things you’re working on with client visibly.