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Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

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Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#61

Post by tomcam »

dbg31415 wrote: post #16

These are a few things that have gotten me praise over the years: 1) Keep emails short. I set a 200 word max on all emails. If you can't say what you need to say in 200 words, schedule a meeting to discuss. If you have to send long documents, send a 2-3 sentence summary. Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them... in 200 words. (= 2) Keep detailed time records and make them av…

Damn. You're hired!

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#62

Post by elorant »

Build much better UIs than my competition. It's a known issue, we developers rarely take the time to bother with UI and it's a shame because it makes all the difference in the world, especially in web apps. Clients can't tell technical superiority, they can only judge from what they see and if your UI is stellar you'll make selling a lot easier. And you know, judging from the fact that so many of us are afraid of the sales side this could be a lifesaver. Build better UIs to counteract the fact that you suck at sales.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#64

Post by mercer »

RickS wrote: post #21

Here's an internal facing one: We send an automated greeting from the CEO as part of onboarding, but he actually sees and replies to every customer response, in both english and spanish, and forwards the more heartwarming ones on to the entire office. It's pretty cool to get a handful of emails every day from actual customers who are very grateful for the work we do. It also changed my opinion on the "canned CEO gree…

I generally respond rather negatively to automated emails or chat messages that seem human but are not, and I've been thinking of how I would approach this if I had a company big enough that automatic greetings are 'necessary' (or desirable, at least).

Perhaps one solution is to use a clearly non-human company 'avatar' character specifically for some of these interactions? A robot or pet character?

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#65

Post by angrymouse »

I work in a large health organisation right now and the thing that seems to blow most away is just saying yes.

I don't work in the IT department and they basically say no to everything. Regardless of business value or difficulty.

I work in the chief executive office and numerous departments will be amazed when I say yes... Let me look into that.

Recent example was a publicly facing, real-time waiting time tracker for the city's A&E (as well as two walk in centres). Each solution I thought of had compromises but they chose the one they could live with.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#66

Post by stunthamsterio »

I spend a lot of time picking up existing and 'legacy' platforms, and it consistently seems to impress my clients when I'm able to implement automation, even on so called 'un-automatable' platforms.

I also think it's the ability to understand that the business and the technical elements may not always work in lockstep, and being able to translate the needs of one to the other.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#68

Post by julienmarie »

Something we were doing when I had a web design agency was to have awesomely beautiful and detaild proposals where we summed up the context, constraints and goals of the project. We considered them as our first deliverable and spent time creating beautiful indesign templates. It allowed us to stand out from the start. Another thing is while our competitors were usually not showing anything yet at this bidding stage, we were already delivering some high def mockups, sometimes within the weekend. Last thing, we didn't have any sales people. Meetings with leads and customers were directly being handled by tech leads and lead designers, who were not there to sell, but to advise and find solutions with the client, explaining and integrating the client within the process from the start. All in all, we won all the biddings at the time despite being usually 30% more expensive. Something we were doing also is to include free perks that didn't cost us anything and was making a lot of difference for them ( free access to our email marketing platform, server monitoring, etc... ).

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#70

Post by gpayal »

tomcam wrote: post #58
gpayal wrote: post #49

Consistent updates(mostly daily) on email with screenshots and quick short screencasts. A lot of times a particular feature takes more than a day to complete and be pushed to some server for client to actually see what it looks like. But if I create in progress screenshots and videos from my dev machine it always impresses my clients.

That's brilliant and super easy. I hope a lot of people read your post.

thank you :)
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