Surprise Your Clients with Delightful Extras
By going the extra mile, you can surprise clients with efforts beyond the agreed Statement of Work, you demonstrate your value and create a memorable experience that leaves a positive impression of your business.
If you're narrowly judging your success from single project metrics—like, did we use less of our project's hours than we estimated—you'll end up with an agency culture that only produces single projects with your clients, chasing new clients and new projects for eternity. But by embracing client appreciation, you can surprise them by going above and beyond the scope of work.
There are many phases to a project life cycle; one of our absolute favorites is the polish. It's here that the functionality is solidified, and things start to come to life. As you're staring down the barrel of a launch, it's a common reaction for the producer to take out that spreadsheet and start hawking people to use fewer hours and meet their budgets. But that’s not what good client relationships are about.
Don't get me wrong, we need to be profitable! However, this is also your prime opportunity to adjust your agency culture to show some serious client appreciation.
This is what we call The Joyride.
To put this into action, throughout the project's creation, we create a "parking lot" of little "nice to have" polish items that have come up internally and haven't yet been discussed with the client. Nothing that impacts the user experience but, instead, are enhancements like little UI animations, transitions, features the client mentioned that "they wish they had more budget" for, etc. This is what client service is all about.
For the game Star Wars Resistance Racer, we had a few items that were out of scope, but we added them to our internal parking lot anyway. As the project progressed and we started reaching final delivery, we looked for ways to integrate some of these items.
For example, when we first started the project Lucas Arts delivered some amazing 3D assets, including all the ships and characters. We felt that bringing a character companion to life in the game would be a little treat for the players and add an emotional connection. Animating a human character would have taken a considerable amount of time to rig, animate, and lip sync. However, we did see an opportunity to animate a character that had a deep connection to the larger Star Wars universe and resonated with the audience for this game.
We chose BB-8.
Imagine the clients' delight when they saw BB-8 unexpectedly roll onto the screen during play testing, just as we were rounding the finish line. Lucas Arts was impressed with our ability to replicate the character's personality and loved that we added this level of detail to the game—which, for us, their excitement was a great reward on its own.
Our commitment to finding opportunities to add these extras to our client relationship is deeply ingrained in our work culture. We understand that the experience we create in working with our clients is paramount. The lasting impression we leave with our client service holds immense value. When we take a project on the 'Joyride', we surprise clients with our passion from concept to completion. This excitement and added value become a memorable experience that clients would want to re-live again.
Let's connect, talk about your client relationships, and maybe I’ll surprise you too! :)
