When You’re in It for the Long Haul
Quick tips for managing productive long-term UX consulting relationships with enterprise clients
When I started working at my current company over 5 years ago now, we had a handful of clients that were all on retainer. The founder of our small UX consultancy comes from the marketing world where it was common for agencies to have ongoing engagements with clients. I had come from more of a web design and UX consulting background where one-time projects were the norm. Our company has since evolved into a mixed model where we have long-term, monthly relationships with some clients and work on a project-by-project basis with others.
We still have a monthly retainer relationship with our longest-standing client, which is an enterprise financial services company that shall not be named. Here are some key elements to making a long-term UX consulting relationship work well, even when you are not co-located with the client.
Keep up With the Client’s Org Chart
If you’ve ever worked for or with a large company, you know that a lot can change in a short amount of time. People come and go, leadership changes, and priorities change with incoming and outgoing leads. If you have a particularly engaged person managing your relationship, that’s great because that person will likely keep you in the know. If you don’t, or the relationship is diffused over multiple people, it’s valuable to do whatever you can to keep context.
We have a biweekly meeting with the folks who lead the teams that are relevant to UX. We also do periodic review meetings, whether it’s quarterly, twice a year, or whatever cadence makes sense. These meetings allow us to zoom out, look at what we’ve been working on, and ask whether anything has changed on the client side that might inform the work we do.
Be Flexible
We’re flexible with this client in a few ways. Broadly, we allow the relationship to evolve with their needs. In the past, we’ve done everything from a long-standing program of research with customer service reps to periodic live testing events where we joined the client for a day of user observation and workshop activities. Recently, we’ve been doing a lot of work around the idea of Effortless Experience and comparing our clients’ UX to its competitors’.
We have always been a distributed team, but the folks we work with are new to working from home. So during the pandemic, we’ve also been showing them the ropes about how to do the work we do without an office.
Speak Their Language
Our client uses communication practices, tools, and software that’s different from what we use in our day-to-day work. Instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, we take pains to use their methods. This keeps communication flowing smoothly. Some ways we do this:
- We use their document formats and templates — Word and PowerPoint rather than our preferred G-Docs.
- We use their sharing tools — Box rather than Drive or Dropbox.
- We log into their chat program — WebEx Teams rather than Slack.
- We use their meeting software to join calls — WebEx rather than Zoom or GoToMeeting.
- We report hours in their format — their custom format rather than our own use of Harvest.
To summarize these three high-level ideas, we do what we can to meet our long-term clients where they are instead of pushing our own ideas about how things should be done. It has worked well for this long-standing client relationship and allowed us to do some great UX projects together.
