What Clients’ Expects From You As A “Technology Partner” — My Experience
After working, interacting with many clients and prospects based out of the US, UK, Europe, Middle East, Singapore, Canada, etc. I came out with some of the major factors that Clients expect from their “Technology Partner” and sometimes due to the absence of these factors in Technology Partner, the Clients turn off the deal or the engagement doesn’t go far.
Following are some of the Major Expectation of Clients from the Technology Partners:
- Communication:
The clients expect you to provide the resources that are good in communication. They expect clear communication they don’t want your resource to explicitly go and learn the ascents neither do they expect resources to be highly fluent. But they expect the resources to be clear and precise about what they are trying to convey.
Techie people rarely communicate and are more interested, involved in some or other technical stuff. So it is always preferred to tell your Techie resource to Communicate often and in non-technical language with the clients.
As we all know communication is a key ingredient for almost every kind of business. If you are highly knowledgeable and you are not able to transfer your knowledge then the knowledge you are having may not create as much value as it can by using good communication.
And as a Technology partner “communication” should never be a barrier. Good communication can boost your business, increase trust, comfort, and compatibility with clients.
We at Scalent as a Technology Partner have our major criteria while hiring the resource is “Good Communication” of the resource. And so all our Golang developers have good communication and we encourage them to give ideas, suggestions, feedback in a clear and precise way.
2. Overlapping Time:
Overlapping time, was the second most important factor for which most of the clients look for. Many clients I interacted with expressed about the issues they have faced with either outsourcing their work or remotely extending their team when it has huge time differences.
The client expects from Technology partner to at least provide the overlapping time of 3–5hours/day for some initial weeks of the engagement. As the initial week is the critical period for the deployed resource as well as the client.
At Scalent, we provide our developer to the US client with the overlapping time of 4- 6 hours/day for initial engagement, and for UK based clients we provide 8 hours/ day overlapping time. This definitely helps the team based out of the client-side as well as to our team who are deployed on a particular project. Overlapping time keeps everyone on the same page. Overlapping time plays a major role for the clients based out of the US and UK. We assure our client with a good amount of overlapping time and along with its flexibility in timing to our resources.
3. Ownership:
Clients expect that Technology Partners should take full ownership of clients’ projects. The project should be treated as if it is a Technology partner’s own project. Resources deployed on this project should take end to end responsibility for their tasks. Attention to the detailed is expected from the resources.
At Scalent, Ownership, and Responsibility are given quite a good importance. Our developers make sure to deliver the task before the deadlines and they make sure that if there is some dependency of others they will make sure it gets completed by taking multiple follow up, providing gentle reminders but at the end of the day taking Ownership of the task provided to them.
4. Active Listening:
Clients expect that their Technology Partner, as well as the resource provided by them, should be the active listener and for every long-lasting relationship require participants to be active listeners to what other participant says. The clients want you to make decisions based on the understanding that you have gained after listening to them and this is where active listening plays an important role. If the resource deployed by Technology Partner triggers some query they should proactively ask questions in order to get the clarity of things.
At Scalent we train our Golang developer for better listening skills. Training includes activity and mock discussion. Which directly enhances the Listening skills of our Golang developer
5. Business specifics:
Clients expect the Technology Partner should know the specifics Client’s business. And in order to understand that Technology partners need to keep “foot in their shoes” and they can relate more to what is the client’s business and its specifics.
At Scalent, we prefer to invest our developer’s time and effort to learn about the client’s business domain, tools, and technologies they are using. This prior investment helps us to provides more value to our clients.
The above-listed points have helped us a lot to provide a really good value to our clients. These factors are crucial for the long term and fruitful relationship with the client. Being just a Technology company is not sufficient to make you a successful Technology Partner for the clients.
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