Insights and Ingenuity

A note to professional service providers:

1. When you’re late, I notice. If repeated, it makes me feel unimportant and insignificant.
2. When you reply to the punch list I emailed you without actually addressing any of my list items, I notice. And I begin to feel steamrolled.
3. When we have a recurring status call and you don’t join the conference, I notice. It tells me my time isn’t important to you.
4. When you accept my money but don’t deliver the product, I notice. One-sided relationships don’t work.
5. I recognize a “dodge and weave” a mile away (“…let me check with Joe Bob and I’ll get back to you, but he’s out today so it’ll probably be tomorrow afternoon, after he catches up from having been OOO…”)
6. It’s easy to determine when you really know nothing about my business, and haven’t tried to apply yourself either (Why else would you report our new site 95% complete and likely to launch in a couple of days? Any casual observer could see the styling issues, non-functional shopping cart, content misspellings, lack of inventory content…).
7. I expect you to do QA before you send me something to review. Even concepts have to be logical and relevent in order for me to evaluate them.
8. I never want to feel as though attempting to escalate my concerns would be fruitless. There has to be someone somewhere highly accountable for my satisfaction.
9. Don’t tell me all the reasons why something won’t work. Figure out what I’m trying to get done and suggest stop-gaps or alternatives or work-arounds.
10. Listen to me describe my needs, my situation, my ideas. Since you’ve read up on my market and my competition, you can ask intelligent questions to help me drill down to specific areas of pursuit, perhaps uncovering root cause/attention.
11. Recognize your own strengths and weaknesses. If you’re the creative visionary, don’t also blunder through serving as producer simply because your ego requires you to control everything. I know when I’m being condescended to. And because you *didn’t* immerse yourself in my biz, my market, you presume to know what’s best.
12. While I might seek to hire a skilled, experienced provider of XX (specialized) services, that’s not mutually exclusive to brand/market/category/channel interpretation.
13. Own your mistakes. I’ll own mine. I won’t persecute you for a genuine oversight when all other behavior indicates real interest and effort. But don’t get defensive when it’s your monkey.
14. Collaborative. Accountable. Quality-conscious. Detail-oriented. Reliable. Solution-focused. Attentive. These are key values to any service organization worth their salt.

I understand scope creep, well-written project briefs, statements of work, service level agreements, billable time, double-booking, and taxed account representatives. Having lived life agency-side for 16 years, I know the harsh realities of many clients not knowing what they want (need) until they see what they don’t like. Of decision-by-committee diluting the output of a project to the point it no longer serves the original objective strongly. But people, there are tools, processes, and plain ‘ole direct communication (phone! conference reports! status reports!) to address most of those challenges and threats.

Please get your act together. I’m not fooled. And while you may have already cashed my check, you won’t be getting any more.

* This rant dedicated to the shoddy web services companies, commercial photographers, and syndicated content suppliers I’ve run into lately. What the hell is wrong with you? Oh, and also to the propane company I prepay each winter that gave me the distinct displeasure of a freezing house and empty tank yesterday. Thanks, man. And yes, I did say *prepaid.* Also Iowa and December. ‘Nuff.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Customer Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.