It is true that creativity attracts new clients and helps web development agencies win awards, but it is a good client experience that keeps them coming back and ensures long-term growth. But client satisfaction isn’t the easiest to crack. Many agencies have difficulty retaining clients due to poor quality of work, over-promising under-delivering, no set processes, and poor project management, among other reasons. The client satisfaction metric ultimately determines the success of an agency.
This article examines some of the challenges web development agencies face in providing a good client experience, and some solutions to those challenges.
Challenge 1: Too many services offerings
Most web development agencies face the challenge of not prioritising a few specific services, especially when starting out. Many agencies crash and burn in the process. For example: clubbing web development with a plethora of other services such as SEO, SEM, social media, digital strategy, branding etc. This requires a lot of hiring to help facilitate the process and exceed client expectations. Sometimes agencies don’t have the resources to scale to include all the services, resulting in poor ROI for clients.
Solution: Focus on core service
Therefore, if you focus what you do around a core offering, you will be better at that and be able to produce quality work and ultimately provide better results to clients. This way agencies can charge a premium by honing a few skills and being an expert in their field. Keep relationships close, deliver good results, and help clients grow.
Tip: Choose services that set your agency apart from others, can be scaled with existing resources, and give you an edge over your competitors.
Challenge 2: Lack of project understanding
Behind every stellar creative work is a powerful brief. A well-written brief can make creative projects run efficiently and produce better results for your clients. Often, project managers make the mistake to dump all project information into a document, making it nearly impossible for the creatives to understand the brief.
Solution: Briefing process and template
Creative brief acts as a roadmap that takes a project from ideation to completion. It’s a single source of truth for everyone involved in the project. A good creative brief ensures the scope of work, timeline, project goals and objectives, and clarity of deliverables. If your agency is struggling with writing good briefs, perhaps it’s time to create a basic brief structure that will guide your project managers to get proficient at taking notes and asking the right questions to the clients. This will not only bring project managers the clarity they need to write stellar briefs but also help them get more involved in the project and steer things in the right direction.
Tip: Create a reverse brief and get the client’s approval before creative work begins to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Challenge 3: Broken internal processes
“How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”
– Yvon Chouinard
Websites are a complex beast and keeping clients happy isn’t easy if your team is just winging a checklist. When you’re juggling tens of clients daily, a well-defined process is important to progression. Without it, projects will stall, delays will cause frustrations, and your team and the clients you work with will begin to feel the strain. If your team or clients are complaining about things taking too much time, it’s time you prioritise building a process that’s efficient and adaptable.
Solution: Prioritising process building
Some of the best ways to document agency processes are to take stock of your agency and client’s needs, identify the core functions of your business and its pain points, and outline the expectations and responsibilities of each team member. There are tons of agency tools that can be easily integrated into your process, choose a tech stack that is unique to your agency and client’s needs.
These processes and tools should be reviewed from time to time so that they can be used consistently for better results and client experience.
Tip: The inclusion of client-facing tools in your process will give you an edge over your competitors.
Challenge 4: Scope Creep
As the project progresses, clients tend to request new items that are usually not accounted for in the project’s scope. Before you know it, the project has doubled in size. Having definitive contracts and deliverables at the start of the project is crucial to avoid scope creep which is one of the major challenges of any web development agency.
Solution: Creating winning proposals
Therefore, it is advisable to create a list of items that are included in the scope and get a sign-off from your clients early on. Clients do not always have the experience of running a website project, so it becomes crucial for the agency to educate their clients on what to expect. By clearly defining the scope and deliverables, you can anchor the project’s costs and save tons of time.
Tip: Click here to learn how to define the scope of your next web design and development project.
Challenge 5: Managing website projects and client feedback
Managing multiple web projects at once, communicating effectively with clients, keeping track of changes, and providing project updates are some of the biggest challenges web development agencies face. Not to mention the pain of collecting timely and constructive website feedback via countless emails from clients. Poor project management can result in unhappy clients and missed deadlines, so it is essential to be proficient in this field.
Solution: Website feedback tool
An effective website feedback tool will save you tons of time and result in lower operational costs, higher efficiency, and a better client experience.
Tip: If you are ready to test out a website feedback tool, BugHerd is the world’s leading visual feedback and bug-tracking tool.
Globally, thousands of agencies and marketing teams love it for the ease and collaboration it brings to their website projects. BugHerd has revolutionised the way agencies collect and manage website feedback from clients and internal teams. It is perfect for anyone involved in website design and development.
With BugHerd your team and clients can easily pin feedback directly to specific elements of the web pages. It acts as a transparent layer on the website that is visible only to the agency and added members, for example, clients. Submitted feedback and bugs are sent to a central Kanban task board that provides all stakeholders with full visibility of the project.
Case Study: How Charle, a Shopify agency, delivers work that exceeds client expectations and keeps clients happy.
“A successful day is hearing the great feedback we get from clients regarding new designs, web development and integrations for the stores we work with. We wanted a platform that makes it as efficient as possible for our clients to provide feedback on the work that we carry out.”
– Ross Adamson, Marketing Executive
Client satisfaction for Charle is about delivering projects the way their clients want them. Their willingness to explore cutting-edge technology helps them deliver bespoke Shopify website builds that exceed client expectations and have led to Charle winning multiple awards for their work.
So, what drives the team at Charle to deliver exceptional work? A chance to test new technology?
Background:
Charle started in 2018 and in the early stages, bug tracking and website QA were manual and unstructured. Exceeding client expectations and delivering projects the way the client wants is of utmost importance to Charle. In fact, it was the desire to get clients involved in providing feedback on projects that led Charle to discover BugHerd.
“We wanted a platform that makes it as efficient as possible for our clients to provide feedback on the work that we carry out.”
Discovering that BugHerd could help the team with bug tracking and Quality Assurance before sharing with clients was a big plus.
Result:
“BugHerd allows work to be delivered just how our clients want it to ensure they’re fully happy.”
How BugHerd helps Charle, the Shopify web development agency in the process:
- After the new e-commerce site is created, Charle’s internal team does an initial run-through, capturing bugs or issues using BugHerd.
- They then encourage clients and end users to jump on and provide feedback for their work. Feedback is welcome on anything, from changes in design, to the functionality of the website.
“Our developers seem a lot happier, and we’ve managed to deliver projects about 20-30% quicker when we’re fully utilising the BugHerd platform.”
Having increased productivity and gained more time, Charle is currently developing new services such as headless architecture. With the rapid expansion of the team, Charle is also considering opening more offices in new cities.
Click here to read more such customer success stories of BugHerd.
How to get started with BugHerd 14-Day Free Trial?
BugHerd is a user-friendly website feedback tool, and it is easy to get started in 3-simple steps. There is No Credit Card Required for a free 14-day trial.
STEP 1
Go to bugherd.com and click Start Free trial.
STEP 2
Sign up to create your first project. You can test BugHerd out on any website. It will only be visible to you.
STEP 3
And voila! You can start collecting feedback and invite others to try it out with you. It’s that simple.
Conclusion
Referral rates are higher at agencies with great client experiences. It is what keeps them coming back and referring your work to others. Happy client servicing!
Take advantage of BugHerd’s 14-day free trial and create a test project to get familiar with the tool. It’s easy to use and there’s no credit card required.
To learn how BugHerd can be integrated into your agency workflow, book a demo with one of our team members.
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