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 specifically. But I've found they are blown away when they see how everything is updated in real time. It just makes the whole thing feel 'alive'.
Another thing which I don't personally love, but I do because I understand industries have differences is just exporting whatever can be exported into .csv files or .xls files where applicable.
All in all, I work in consulting. The code I write is meant to make the life of people easier, I want to make sure they get that when possible. A big part of why I'm able to do this is that I have a lot of creative freedom to do whatever I want so long as I'm getting stuff shipped. So huzzah for comprehensive management as well!
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! :)
My answer here is more relevant to an e-commerce company but the basic idea can be adapted to any company.
So, back in 1994, my dad and me started an ecommerce company (bikeworld.com) that sold bicycle parts online. It was an extension of his brick-and-mortar bicycle business and I took a couple of years leave from college to help him build it.
He did one thing early on that generated amazing word-of-mouth support: send a little treat in every order box. Our company was based in San Antonio, TX and Dad decided to include a little local flavor with each order to make us stand out from the few competitors we had back then (incumbent mail order outfits). At every good Mexican restaurant back home, they sell Mexican chewy candies at the cash register when you pay after your meal. My dad and I loved these things so he went to the manufacturer in town and bought a few cases of them. They were really expensive, like $0.50 each, and it became a big expense but the customers went nuts. Dad printed up a little card that he put in the bag with the candy, explaining the tradition and thanking them for their business. It worked well--we quickly became one of the largest online bicycle stores of the late 90s.
I run The Human Utility (formerly the Detroit Water Project) and we help folks with their water bills. When they reach us, they're used to dealing with other social service agencies that aren't very responsive and don't do something as basic as ever calling them back. We do and we find that people are grateful even for that.
Edit: People are happy to hear from us regardless of whether we actually help with their bills. If we say we can't, at least they know to try elsewhere and can do so fairly quickly.
I have to +1 this. Whilst I have never specifically dealt with Human Utility. A couple of times when I had an inquiry or an issue, I have been offered to be called back later rather than wait and eventuall call back myself. Each time I appreciated the phone call.
When I did freelancing, I charged a bit more than I felt I should... but went above and beyond. My hourly rate may have been high, but I spent many "non-billable hours" making sure everything worked great and any changes (their fault or mine) were accounted for.
I did a few jobs where someone else controlled the billing, and kept us on a tight schedule. Every hour was billed. We were "fired" (AKA contract not renewed) every time. Yet when I went above and beyond, I had no problem getting and maintaining awesome clients.
As someone on the opposite side now (hiring freelancers), I've realized the thing I value most: the freelancer gives me less work, not more. It may seem obvious, but when I was on the other side, it wasn't. When I hire freelancers now, I value one overarching quality: to make my life easier. I don't care about price or hours (within reason), I care about not having to think about it.
I never disagree with a client. Even if I internally feel it won't work in reality, I always start my response with "That's an excellent idea you proposed, let me try if it works and get back to you". I come back after a day or two as to why the proposal won't work (if it was a bad idea to begin with) with sufficient data. Client is happy you that you considered his proposal and you've avoided a potential standoff that could've existed for the same duration !
I'm not sure that this blows the client away tbh. I had much more success with being critical but within reason. If a client suggests a feature I do not believe will work or is not worth the time, my approach is to agree that this is technically possible and it will take X amount of time with Y drawbacks (e.g. harder to maintain in the future, manual effort later on). And then I'll tell them my opinion about it from a business perspective. I don't push in any direction and make it clear that if this is what they want, I'll get to work right away.
But then again, I only work with clients who appreciate feedback and don't think of me as a person turning coffee into code ;)
I caught my Macro professor doing this and it works wonders. It really encourages people to ask questions, even if they might think they are inane. He always started with a ~sincere~ "X, that is a really good question." It makes everyone feel really welcomed to give their input no matter how small. Even though it might not be "sincere" at all it still feel like it is. How would you feel if you asked a question in class and the professor said: "That's actually a really stupid question but I'll answer it anyway."
Depending on the context in which you do this, you've also just wasted 2 days of billable time.
If you know it won't work from the start, you're not providing value to your customer by fake considering it.
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 when a customer suggests to "encrypt dsta using the cipher md5". Yes it has happened. More than once.
If someone recognizes an impractical or suboptimal idea, I prefer it to be called out immediately for discussion so we can move past it to a better idea.
It helps if clients think like Darwin:
"I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved, as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it."
That might be better than what I do. I disagree, perhaps not often, but there are bits of functionality that I think just aren't justifiable/cost-effective. So I try and dissuade them. Although sometimes I might be a bit too vocal. That said, I do try and say that, at the end of the day they can definitely just say "shush... Just build it" and I will. But I'm honestly trying to help them build the best product we can, as effectively as possible.
That's a classic. While working on the David, Michelangelo had the unwelcome visit of Piero Soderini (statesman, sponsor, etc) who suggested that the nose was too thick.
Michelangelo feigned reworking the nose and some say sprinkled a handful of marble dust to make the trick credible, then asked Soderini if he liked it now. He said it looked better.
So disingenuously humor the client for a day or two before shooting their idea. Honestly, if I was your client and this happened a few times, I would start to wonder why you lack the expertise to immediately know ideas won't work.
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 greeting". As someone who knows how those are built, they always struck me as annoying and disingenuous sales gimmicks, but our customers are significantly less tech savvy, and a huge number take the correspondence at face value and actually start a real conversation with the CEO.
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?
I did the same for new account registrations on my site. The humorous side effect was actually LinkedIn. That whole thing where you can auto invite everyone on your contact list... led to me getting several connection invites a day from users I had never personally met.
I do hardware engineering work for hire and one of the things that always works is having some documentation ready at the first formal meeting.
Specifically, I have a skeleton requirements document that I put together from our previous correspondence (there's always a phone call, few emails, etc.) trying to flesh out their project needs. It doesn't matter if this is incomplete, inaccurate, or any other in-word. It shows that I'm a professional who has tried to understand the problem, the business case, possible solutions, will approach it methodically and like a real engineer, and that I know what I'm doing.
Those 10-15, printed, very real, pages, mostly just ?-marks, have written me more contracts than I can count. It takes about 1-2 hours of work to write things up, but I've never - not once -, had a potential client fail to notice and be impressed when I show up and have a presentable document already underway.
This is generally the way to win contracts, grants and impress people. Going over their requirements carefully, whether written or verbal, and gearing your proposal directly to what they say always impresses. That's why changing project managers at the beginning of or before a contract starts is a big problem.
So important to have requirements set up for the less "agile" world of hardware, but really like the idea of having a framework set to go. Have worked with a few contract agencies at past co's and that would have impressed the hell out of me.
This is always as a solo? Or as a small engineering firm?
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?
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.
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 available to the client on-demand. They paid for it, might as well show them what they are getting. Be honest... if your team wasted 4 hours trying to make sense of a BS email from the client... make sure they understand that.
3) Being on time and inclusive; inviting them to daily standup meetings with the team, and posting notes from those standup meetings in case they (or anyone else) can't be there. Easy with a Google Sheet to just type a few notes each day during standup. I don't have any tools for the team that the client can't access, or hasn't been given a rundown on how we utilize it.
Call them out when they're wasting money on marketing. This has been in my "blog post drafts" folder for a while, but the short version is: One of the first things I do on new projects (I'm a customer acquisition consultant) is review the running campaigns and their results from the past few months. Not clicks—which is what all the dashboards show you—but actual results like signups and new customers.
Almost always I find money being drained away. There was the time when a company targeting Python developers was losing its AdWords budget on snake enthusiasts. Another time a mobile analytics company was spending thousands on people searching for free apps. In another case a company whose ads went to a 404 page and nobody realized. Also recently I found that an SEO agency was falsifying results to one of my clients (the contract was quickly terminated).
I don't know if "blown away" is the correct phrase. It's more like a brief moment of embarrassment followed a huge sense of relief that a budget leak was found and plugged.
PS - The companies described here have successful products made by brilliant people. This is more a symptom of hiring the marketers who don't have the skill (or intention) to demonstrate the results of their efforts.
One thing we did a few years ago when we found that a customer didn't use revision control was to bring in a server. A small PC with Linux, Subversion and Trac. We not only could explain the benefits of RCS, but the customer could see changes, att issues, get them resolved etc. When the job was done, the customer kept the machine.
I occasionally bump into old customers and many still run the same server. All of them are today using revision control systems.
So basically we didn't just provide a tech solution, but also brought in methodology and free tools to implement that methodology.
Lower their prices, without prompting. At Flexport we sell logistics services. The price of ocean freight is highly variable (less dynamic than, say, the stock market or airline seats, but still fluctuates a ton). We make money by brokering these services. In some cases, the price of freight drops in the time between customers when contract us (and agree to a price) and the service gets executed (when we contract with the asset owner). We pass those savings on to the customer and let them know. This usually results in big joy, all around.
I have a rotating list of power user tips. I'll pick one to show someone during a trouble call (provided no one is in a huge hurry). It has to be something cool that I can demonstrate/teach in seconds. Examples:
Snipping tool. Rather than writing down error codes.
Windows key + start typing the program name. Rather than navigating the start menu.
Piles of excel tricks. (everyone loves excel)
The big thing is knowing your audience. People enjoy participating in something, not just being shown things they can never accomplish. If you make it something they can't understand it will just make them feel stupid or frustrated.
I'll add one here from my own business, which is customer care outsourcing. The outbound call. Basically it comes with the territory when things go wrong. But when you call the customer before they realize things have gone wrong they are always, always grateful and impressed. Same thing goes for a "just checking in to see you are enjoying the service" call. Since we have agents sitting around all the time anyway this is time that can be used to call up customers and impress them.
I used to work for Rollbar and their "person tracking" feature really super powered this. I was a customer of Rollbar before I worked there, and would regularly catch and fix bugs for our clients before someone had the chance to notify us about it.
Look at how many of the answers in this thread are simply about communicating effectively.
That mirrors my experience when I was on the service provider side, and as someone who is now consuming those same services, I can confirm that I am most impressed by my providers when the communications are focused, helpful and timely.
A lot of the time, when a client has a request, they are thinking out loud in the moment.
Even if I can't pick up the phone, I'll send a short email straight away to let them know that
1. I got the message
2. Timeframe when I can action
1. Deliver just a little more than they expect. Most times when we write a web app for enterprise customers, we try and give them a little bit of extra functionality than they ask for. One example is the user profile settings for their sign on to our web apps - most customers are only bothered with having a username and password, but we often incorporate things like ability to choose avatar images or upload their own images against their profile.
We did this on one education site we developed, and also gave them the ability to choose from about a dozen 'stock' cartoon style avatars if they didn't want to upload their own images. The users were impressed at the handover training session we ran, but I overhead one guy (who was indigenous Australian aboriginal descent) jokingly remark that the stock avatars didn't have a person of indigenous culture represented.
I took note of that, and when I returned to the office, we added a handful of indigenous avatars as well within the hour. Client was happy that we went the extra mile to take their offhand comment seriously and deliver on it.
2. Saying 'No' to 'easy money' projects. We've worked with some of our clients for over 20 years now. Mainly because often when they come to us to add on features to their custom written apps, we often say 'No', along with some valid data to explain why we thing the $$$ sunk into the added feature are of very little benefit.
This has lead to them trusting us a LOT more when we go the other way. Real world case study - we had one client, whom we developed a short term loan application for, ask us to add a Monday morning report with customer mobile numbers so they could do a ring around check for customers who were about to default on their loans.
I said 'Sure, but lets go one better'. I said that along with the report, it wouldn't take much extra work to actually have the system send out an SMS message to all those clients as well, with details on their upcoming defaults, and what they needed to do to fix the issue.
They were delighted and said to go for it. Well, that was two years ago, and it turns out that the SMS messages by themselves have reduced their default rate by an incredible amount, and they are FAR more profitable as a result. Hmm, maybe I should have asked for a percentage of profit increase as my payment! :)
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... ).
[+] [-] Zyst|9 years ago|reply
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 specifically. But I've found they are blown away when they see how everything is updated in real time. It just makes the whole thing feel 'alive'.
Another thing which I don't personally love, but I do because I understand industries have differences is just exporting whatever can be exported into .csv files or .xls files where applicable.
All in all, I work in consulting. The code I write is meant to make the life of people easier, I want to make sure they get that when possible. A big part of why I'm able to do this is that I have a lot of creative freedom to do whatever I want so long as I'm getting stuff shipped. So huzzah for comprehensive management as well!
[+] [-] lb1lf|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chrissnell|9 years ago|reply
So, back in 1994, my dad and me started an ecommerce company (bikeworld.com) that sold bicycle parts online. It was an extension of his brick-and-mortar bicycle business and I took a couple of years leave from college to help him build it.
He did one thing early on that generated amazing word-of-mouth support: send a little treat in every order box. Our company was based in San Antonio, TX and Dad decided to include a little local flavor with each order to make us stand out from the few competitors we had back then (incumbent mail order outfits). At every good Mexican restaurant back home, they sell Mexican chewy candies at the cash register when you pay after your meal. My dad and I loved these things so he went to the manufacturer in town and bought a few cases of them. They were really expensive, like $0.50 each, and it became a big expense but the customers went nuts. Dad printed up a little card that he put in the bag with the candy, explaining the tradition and thanking them for their business. It worked well--we quickly became one of the largest online bicycle stores of the late 90s.
[+] [-] tiffani|9 years ago|reply
I run The Human Utility (formerly the Detroit Water Project) and we help folks with their water bills. When they reach us, they're used to dealing with other social service agencies that aren't very responsive and don't do something as basic as ever calling them back. We do and we find that people are grateful even for that.
Edit: People are happy to hear from us regardless of whether we actually help with their bills. If we say we can't, at least they know to try elsewhere and can do so fairly quickly.
[+] [-] Insanity|9 years ago|reply
Something so simple, yet great for customers!
[+] [-] gkoberger|9 years ago|reply
I did a few jobs where someone else controlled the billing, and kept us on a tight schedule. Every hour was billed. We were "fired" (AKA contract not renewed) every time. Yet when I went above and beyond, I had no problem getting and maintaining awesome clients.
As someone on the opposite side now (hiring freelancers), I've realized the thing I value most: the freelancer gives me less work, not more. It may seem obvious, but when I was on the other side, it wasn't. When I hire freelancers now, I value one overarching quality: to make my life easier. I don't care about price or hours (within reason), I care about not having to think about it.
[+] [-] haarts|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andai|9 years ago|reply
Brilliant, thank you for your comment!
[+] [-] mooreds|9 years ago|reply
Worth remembering.
[+] [-] vcool07|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sgoettschkes|9 years ago|reply
But then again, I only work with clients who appreciate feedback and don't think of me as a person turning coffee into code ;)
[+] [-] Rainymood|9 years ago|reply
Good job.
[+] [-] alltakendamned|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoachimS|9 years ago|reply
One could always reason about things. But to promise to investigate (and then deliver) looks (and is) professional.
But I will never say yes when a customer suggests to "encrypt dsta using the cipher md5". Yes it has happened. More than once.
[+] [-] WhitneyLand|9 years ago|reply
It helps if clients think like Darwin:
"I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved, as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it."
[+] [-] davewasthere|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jugurtha|9 years ago|reply
Michelangelo feigned reworking the nose and some say sprinkled a handful of marble dust to make the trick credible, then asked Soderini if he liked it now. He said it looked better.
[+] [-] IndianAstronaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3minus1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hayd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickS|9 years ago|reply
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 greeting". As someone who knows how those are built, they always struck me as annoying and disingenuous sales gimmicks, but our customers are significantly less tech savvy, and a huge number take the correspondence at face value and actually start a real conversation with the CEO.
[+] [-] mercer|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps one solution is to use a clearly non-human company 'avatar' character specifically for some of these interactions? A robot or pet character?
[+] [-] morgante|9 years ago|reply
I've seen way too many companies implement this where any replies are actually just sent into normal support channels.
[+] [-] pcarmichael|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdpowers|9 years ago|reply
Specifically, I have a skeleton requirements document that I put together from our previous correspondence (there's always a phone call, few emails, etc.) trying to flesh out their project needs. It doesn't matter if this is incomplete, inaccurate, or any other in-word. It shows that I'm a professional who has tried to understand the problem, the business case, possible solutions, will approach it methodically and like a real engineer, and that I know what I'm doing.
Those 10-15, printed, very real, pages, mostly just ?-marks, have written me more contracts than I can count. It takes about 1-2 hours of work to write things up, but I've never - not once -, had a potential client fail to notice and be impressed when I show up and have a presentable document already underway.
[+] [-] jenkstom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisGammell|9 years ago|reply
This is always as a solo? Or as a small engineering firm?
[+] [-] cperciva|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] gpayal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|9 years ago|reply
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 available to the client on-demand. They paid for it, might as well show them what they are getting. Be honest... if your team wasted 4 hours trying to make sense of a BS email from the client... make sure they understand that.
3) Being on time and inclusive; inviting them to daily standup meetings with the team, and posting notes from those standup meetings in case they (or anyone else) can't be there. Easy with a Google Sheet to just type a few notes each day during standup. I don't have any tools for the team that the client can't access, or hasn't been given a rundown on how we utilize it.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcam|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gk1|9 years ago|reply
Almost always I find money being drained away. There was the time when a company targeting Python developers was losing its AdWords budget on snake enthusiasts. Another time a mobile analytics company was spending thousands on people searching for free apps. In another case a company whose ads went to a 404 page and nobody realized. Also recently I found that an SEO agency was falsifying results to one of my clients (the contract was quickly terminated).
I don't know if "blown away" is the correct phrase. It's more like a brief moment of embarrassment followed a huge sense of relief that a budget leak was found and plugged.
PS - The companies described here have successful products made by brilliant people. This is more a symptom of hiring the marketers who don't have the skill (or intention) to demonstrate the results of their efforts.
[+] [-] JoachimS|9 years ago|reply
I occasionally bump into old customers and many still run the same server. All of them are today using revision control systems.
So basically we didn't just provide a tech solution, but also brought in methodology and free tools to implement that methodology.
[+] [-] JensRantil|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanlinehan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johngalt|9 years ago|reply
I have a rotating list of power user tips. I'll pick one to show someone during a trouble call (provided no one is in a huge hurry). It has to be something cool that I can demonstrate/teach in seconds. Examples:
Snipping tool. Rather than writing down error codes.
Windows key + start typing the program name. Rather than navigating the start menu.
Piles of excel tricks. (everyone loves excel)
The big thing is knowing your audience. People enjoy participating in something, not just being shown things they can never accomplish. If you make it something they can't understand it will just make them feel stupid or frustrated.
[+] [-] kisna72|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fapi1974|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justintocci|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpfohl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayajay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loteck|9 years ago|reply
That mirrors my experience when I was on the service provider side, and as someone who is now consuming those same services, I can confirm that I am most impressed by my providers when the communications are focused, helpful and timely.
[+] [-] wiz21c|9 years ago|reply
spot on
[+] [-] rocqua|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kayman|9 years ago|reply
A lot of the time, when a client has a request, they are thinking out loud in the moment. Even if I can't pick up the phone, I'll send a short email straight away to let them know that
1. I got the message 2. Timeframe when I can action
[+] [-] stefek99|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberferret|9 years ago|reply
We did this on one education site we developed, and also gave them the ability to choose from about a dozen 'stock' cartoon style avatars if they didn't want to upload their own images. The users were impressed at the handover training session we ran, but I overhead one guy (who was indigenous Australian aboriginal descent) jokingly remark that the stock avatars didn't have a person of indigenous culture represented.
I took note of that, and when I returned to the office, we added a handful of indigenous avatars as well within the hour. Client was happy that we went the extra mile to take their offhand comment seriously and deliver on it.
2. Saying 'No' to 'easy money' projects. We've worked with some of our clients for over 20 years now. Mainly because often when they come to us to add on features to their custom written apps, we often say 'No', along with some valid data to explain why we thing the $$$ sunk into the added feature are of very little benefit.
This has lead to them trusting us a LOT more when we go the other way. Real world case study - we had one client, whom we developed a short term loan application for, ask us to add a Monday morning report with customer mobile numbers so they could do a ring around check for customers who were about to default on their loans.
I said 'Sure, but lets go one better'. I said that along with the report, it wouldn't take much extra work to actually have the system send out an SMS message to all those clients as well, with details on their upcoming defaults, and what they needed to do to fix the issue.
They were delighted and said to go for it. Well, that was two years ago, and it turns out that the SMS messages by themselves have reduced their default rate by an incredible amount, and they are FAR more profitable as a result. Hmm, maybe I should have asked for a percentage of profit increase as my payment! :)
[+] [-] julienmarie|9 years ago|reply