Unlock onboarding with transparency

"Transparency and honestly makes you vulnerable, be transparent and honest anyway". - by Mother Teresa

I wanted to start this article with the quote because I wanted to highlight the importance of being transparent when you are working or when you are in a relationship. But with your customers, it is working and a professional relationship, so you have to think twice when you are creating a process that has less transparency with the customers.

Let me share a short story about my experience in a project work that I had to get done in my home and what are the key learnings I took from it so my customers at the workplace do not suffer. Learning from the experience is the best because you know what you have to tweak and how it can impact majorly in a project.

I gave a contract to one of the big companies (name hidden) for the interior design space and the contract was given for kitchen remodeling. Initially, the sales rep was amazing and their consultancy gave me a great impression and I knew I made 'the right decision'. Their testimonials by other customers on their site made me happy and their work looked promising.

Soon after the advanced payment, the project work started to get blurry and I had to look for reviews online in other spaces when we came across the reviews which were horrible and the customers were not happy at all. I immediately escalated because I never received a timeline from them as I never asked for it.

Let me take a pause and think:- Is it my responsibility to ask for a timeline? Should I know their communication plan? Should I ask for transparency in their process?

The timeline was shared, but it did not make sense to me as it was not aligned with the work we were supposed to be doing and in my mind, I immediately thought, they have no clue about my project or they may ruin the whole project. While I was paying such a huge amount of money, I never thought I would end up asking for progress manually where in I should have a proper project plan laid out for me to know where they are with the project.

There were no milestones that were shared, and there was no project timeline, and the project plan shared with me, but the work has started is all I knew. This made me think if we are not transparent with our customers, they would eventually be in dark and would lose interest in the whole onboarding.

I wanted to make sure I am thinking broadly and correctly so I conducted a small-scale survey and wanted to know from different levels of experts in different domains. Below is the result of the survey.

53% of people think that transparency on the progress of the project gives customers a seamless experience. How can you be transparent when a project is going on?

1. Share the right timelines. Giving the timelines to the customer would make them feel trusted and they would be patient with you. It removes unnecessary apprehension.
2. Regular updates on the project. Notifying the customer about progress can reduce the anxiety that builds within the customer, and it can in turn impact the whole experience.
3. Milestones tracking - The customers love to know what they have achieved so far.

The issue I faced was not only because of the transparency of the project, but communication within the team also was not great, and there was no documentation of the tasks or the communication that I had done in the past. The handover was not done with proper documentation which is why it impacted the whole project.

Apart from transparency and communication, a very interesting point that came across in the discussion was customer-centric values that need to be included in the team. Without the values, it would be difficult to sustain the level of productivity and high commitment to communication.

I think values play an important role and I would be talking about these values in my next article.

I would love to hear your opinion on this. If you have feedback on how I can improve, I would love to hear from you.

You can connect with me, share this with others, and spread the word,?because someone might be doing different things to save their client, we just need to tell them to do things differently.