Communicating with Clients

Check out our Delivery Workflow Documentation for Clients

Purpose

To identify how we maintain open and productive communication with clients.

Scope

Currently covers general guidelines, reporting on work, and higher level communication priorities.

Communicating With Clients

Reporting on Work

• Use Trello for quick updates, mention all relevant parties so they get a notification.
• Email may be appropriate as well for more substantial updates that deal with several Trello cards.
• Show the clients you work for something at least once a week. You can use Screencastify chrome extension for it (More details).
• Keep it visual. Use screenshots, mockups, videos, and links to staged apps as the primary way to demonstrate work to clients.
• Try to anticipate what problems they will have when using the app, and test the ways you expect them to use it in order to make a seamless experience.
• When reporting on work to clients, re-state what your commitments were and how much is done.
• Indicate anything that’s currently overdue or other unmet commitments as early as possible, indicate how you’re fixing it.

General Client Communication Guidelines

• If something’s unclear to you, as very specific (not open ended) questions and state your assumptions so far so they can point out any miscommunication.
• Be concise. Most clients get a lot of email so stick to key points that will matter to them. Be respectful of their time, and avoid asking for something if you’ve not made an effort to solve it yourself.
• Show appreciation for the client’s time, and anything they’ve done to help the project along.
• Send the communication to only the people who will find it relevant, and copy all team members who have been involved in the project.

Priorities for Client Communication

This is an ordered list of priorities when doing work for clients.

1. Critical downtime events or other urgent bugs. If a service has a serious loss of function the top priority is to restore it, keeping the client updated as you go. When the issue is resolved, discuss with your team how it should have been prevented (staging process, automated test, etc)
2. Communicating with clients. Check emails and Trello at least twice per day (I recommend exactly twice). Prefer Trello for all task related communication. Respond to emails from clients addressing their concerns. If you don’t know how, CC the appropriate person (your manager if unsure) in your response asking for their input. In your response, indicate the time which you expect technical items addressed (e.g. “This will be done by Thursday”) and set that date in the Trello ticket if you need a reminder.
3. Fixing high impact bugs. Things which affect other team members’ or your own work, or are highly visible to the client.
4. Communicate with your team. Unblock others. Is any team member actively waiting for an output of yours? Do that before other work.
5. Get feedback on your work. At least once every 24 hours, share something with team members, end-users or clients (a code review, screenshot on slack, little text update on what you’re working on, shared a link). Keep trying to improve the frequency and quality of feedback you’re getting on your work.
6. Work on cards that have the most impact on your Key Results.
7. Implement cards top to bottom in your Sprint columns of your trello boards, to minimize how much work ends up being late.
8. Go back and make things a little better than you found them. Improve your work so you can be proud of it. Can we improve test coverage, user experience or anything else we forgot to cover in our cards?
9. Grab more cards from your Backlog (top to bottom).