How Transparency Drives Success & Maximizes Revenue in Challenging Economic Times

In today’s challenging economic environment, maintaining strong relationships with your customers is more crucial than ever. Ensuring customer satisfaction and maximizing each engagement is key to mutual success. Sharing project updates and statuses helps keep everyone honest and reduces the friction caused by time delays and budget overruns at the end of the month. Sharing the good and the bad is not always easy, but being transparent ensures that these issues are identified and communicated before they derail the entire project.

Transparency starts during the sales cycle with realistic timelines and clear descriptions of deliverables. It continues with proper monitoring of project statuses and schedules, sharing real-time updates, and providing continuous access to project tasks. This consistent transparency keeps customers happy because there are no surprises at the end of each month. True transparency builds lasting satisfaction.

At Klient, we believe in the power of transparency. This means using our Customer Community to foster collaboration, trust, and mutual success. Beyond sharing project statuses, timelines, and invoices, we also share our product roadmap and invite our customers to vote on new features to be implemented. This ensures that our customers are always part of our growth journey.

Not sure where to start? Here are some of the main items that need to be shared in your customer community to build trust through transparency:

Sharing Project Status

Keeping your customers informed about the status of their projects is essential for building trust. Regular updates on task progress, potential roadblocks, and achievements ensure that your customers are always in the loop. Implementing simple yet rigorous processes makes it easy for your team to share, monitor, and automate these updates. This approach not only builds confidence but also allows for quick adjustments if the project starts veering off course. Sharing project statuses contributes to delivering your project on time, on budget, and on schedule.

🔦 How we do it at Klient: At Klient, we ensure that our Project Status Updates are sent every week to all our customers. We track this with a report and an EOS L10 Weekly Data point. The Salesforce formula for it is: % Budget Status Sent Last Week = Project Status email sent / total active customer projects.

Collaborating with Customers

True transparency goes beyond merely sharing information; it involves active collaboration. Engaging your customers in the project process allows you to tap into their insights and expertise, which can be invaluable. This collaboration can take many forms, such as joint task assignments, shared file access, live chat feeds, and interactive storyboards. Such an approach not only improves project outcomes but also makes customers feel valued and integral to the project’s success.

🔦  How we do it at Klient: When you start an implementation with Klient, the same project that was used during the sales cycle for estimation and the Statement of Work is shared with the customer. Specific read-only views are provided to track milestones, and joint tasks allow the customer to securely submit files, approve deliverables, and change statuses.

Exposing Key Deliverable Dates with Milestones

Milestones are critical checkpoints in any project, marking significant phases of progress. Sharing these simple points in time with your customers ensures alignment on expectations and deadlines. It also provides a clear framework for measuring progress and identifying any delays early on. Sharing key milestone dates helps your customers plan and prepare effectively. Relying on the status and dates of a few key milestones is a great way to keep main stakeholders informed. Instead of having to track multiple tasks and deliverables, you just have to check if the dates of your milestones are sliding.

🔦  How we do it at Klient: At Klient, we share the following key milestones when you undertake a project with us: Signatures, Project Kickoff, Project Plan Confirmed, UAT & Training Kickoff, Project Go-Live, and Project Closure. We share these through our Customer Community, not only with our customers but also with Salesforce Account Executives, who love to be informed of the status of new implementations.

The Role of Klient Customer Community in Enhancing Transparency

Our Customer Community is designed to support transparency and collaboration by exposing key objects and interfaces like Projects, Tasks, Risks, Issues, Invoices, Kanban, Gantt, Chatter, and Milestones. Klient Customer Community provides a comprehensive view for customer engagement. Coupled with live sessions with our Project Advisors to ensure proper implementation, it guarantees customer satisfaction, increases repeat business, and maximizes revenue.

Conclusion

Transparency isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential. It builds trust, encourages collaboration, and keeps everyone on the same page. With Klient’s Customer Community, transparency becomes an integral part of your project management approach. At Klient, we believe that project transparency should be total to ensure mutual success.

Embrace transparency, collaborate actively, and watch your customer relationships flourish.

Written by Yanick Abraham.
You can reach me on LinkedIn, I’m usually very responsive.