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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?

#91

Post by raverbashing »

Zyst wrote: post #48

Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…

How would you export it to xls? ActiveX Excel controller ("in my time this was called COM", etc)? Open source library?

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

#92

Post by onion2k »

sirclueless wrote: post #41
JoachimS wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. We usually say that a good consultant should be senior enough to stand up to the customer and at least be able to inquire the basis for something. And also disagree when the customer is clearly wrong. But your way of doing it clearly removes the initial head-on. One could always reason about things. But to promise to investigate (and then deliver) looks (and is) professional. But I will never say yes whe…

So, to follow the diplomatic approach here: Client: "Encrypt our data using the md5 cipher." Consultant: "I will investigate the feasibility of this." ... two days pass ... Consultant: "I have considered your proposal. I believe we should encrypt your data with SHA-256. md5 is insecure, here's several references. SHA-256 is much more secure and more popular. It is a NIST standard, and just as cheap." Client: (probabl…

Ignoring the encryption/hashing problem, what happens if your client is moderately technical and also researches the problem, and finds the same answer in 5 minutes? You look like you're incredibly slow (or over-billing) if it takes you two days to come back.

Don't assume your client is an idiot.

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

#93

Post by reustle »

mercer wrote: post #64
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?

A few saas products do this and I love it. It feels honest.

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

#94

Post by lb1lf »

Whenever I find myself at my desk not knowing what to fill the next few minutes with, I tend to call a more or less random customer - the ones who USE our products, not the ones who procure them - and ask them what they think suck about our current offerings.

Most educational, and it has resulted in a number of improvements to our product line (subsea handling equipment - used for deployment and maintenance of subsea wellheads, submarine communication&power cables, &c, &c.)

They all expect you to ask what feature they like best; they're always baffled when you rather ask where we've screwed up - and more than happy to help! :)

This is very cheap and effective market research.

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

#95

Post by pknerd »

Zyst wrote: post #48

Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…

+1 for CSV export.

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

#96

Post by pknerd »

I am a developer and usually writes web scrapers or automation tools most of the time beside typical web development. A couple of things I did and worked for me.

- I offer them more than what they expect. At times scraping additional info which I think is useful but they did not realize I extract that too. Sometimes they ask for the script or data, one of them and I just offer them both and they appreciate it lot. Though that script is not helpful for them and they eventually come to me but it's just increase their trust.

- It sounds silly and dangerous but often I don't ask advanced payment from clients and prefer to show off some skills, mostly it was quite helpful and they worked me on other projects as well.

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

#97

Post by JusticeJuice »

cperciva wrote: post #86

If there's a Tarsnap outage because I screwed something up, I give Tarsnap users a credit to their accounts... without waiting for them to complain. Apparently this is unusual. I can't imagine doing it any other way; I mean, who wants to deal with thousands of emails from customers who are owed account credits?

I don't use tarsnap, but I always thought it was a fantastically designed product.

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

#98

Post by Jaruzel »

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…

I like the 200 word thing. I'm gonna give that go. :)

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

#99

Post by neals »

My rates! Seriously. That's how high they are and that's where I want them.

But because I pick up the phone when they call and I seem trustworthy, they pay it. Also, I take my work very seriously, and they get what they pay for.

Contrary to what I read here, I put me first, my company second and the client third. I think that in consulting, this is the only way to stay sane and deliver on time and to spec.

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

#100

Post by inopinatus »

raverbashing wrote: post #91
Zyst wrote: post #48

Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…

How would you export it to xls? ActiveX Excel controller ("in my time this was called COM", etc)? Open source library?

For anyone using Ruby I'd recommend the (open-source) axlsx gem, I've had great results being able to treat Excel generation like I'm rendering a view.
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