Read More:- How to start an essay?
The contract has been signed, all volumes have been agreed upon, and the work is proceeding smoothly. But then you find that your perceptions and expectations with the client are completely different. Not only is the client upset, but you also have to reallocate resources, and this prevents you from serving other clients well.
Our research identified the following main reasons for customer churn:
Exceeding estimates or project deadlines
Difficulties or delays in communicating information
Lack of transparent information about the status of the project
What leads to the most dissatisfaction or churn of your customers?
It is not hard to find a connection between the three reasons for dissatisfaction. Lack of transparency and communication problems often lead to missed plans and missed deadlines. And if the need arises to spend more time and use more resources, it hits the budget.
In our free report, we scrutinize the specific challenges that professional services teams face on a daily basis and outline steps to overcome them. Below we look at three top trends to watch out for if you want to reduce churn and grow your professional services business.
1. Streamline project scheduling and team workload management
A project plan is not just a list of tasks. Team members need to see how their schedule is aligned with the availability of resources in order to identify potential bottlenecks.
Our research has shown that one of the top three reasons why professional services projects are delayed is due to mistakes in planning and managing team workload .
We observe a direct relationship between the inability to organize an effective launch of the project and the violation of the deadlines for its delivery. Even with perfect scheduling and workload management, problems can arise. According to our respondents, the main reason for project delays is last-minute changes in requirements.
In this case, planning projects with possible delays in mind becomes the key to success. One in five survey participants said that having a tool that would make it easier to reschedule and assign work orders to other performers in the event of changes would make the largest contribution to reducing workload.
There are two ways to improve command workload management:
Use request forms to organize incoming work orders and ensure that all requirements are documented and agreed upon prior to project launch. Aligning expectations from the start can help improve planning accuracy and avoid last-minute changes. It also helps to organize all new work.
Use a Gantt chart to visualize dependencies when scheduling tasks on a timeline. As you work on a project, use reporting and time tracking tools to measure performance. Use the information received to clarify the timing. Wrike makes it easy to drag and drop tasks on the chart when you need to change their due date or reallocate resources.
2. Develop consistent processes that improve collaboration
It is one thing to plan a project taking into account possible difficulties and use software tools to quickly reallocate resources, and another thing is to establish information exchange and collaboration. About 25% of our survey respondents cite difficulties or delays in communicating as the main reason for churn.
The ability to maintain your own processes while adapting to customer needs can prove to be a significant competitive advantage. But it requires an unprecedented level of flexibility and interoperability.
Read More:- where can I buy college assignments
One way to help you stay organized and flexible is to limit the number of tools you use in your workflow. More than half of respondents (52%) say they use 2 to 3 tools to manage projects and to interact with internal and / or external stakeholders. 10% use 4 or more instruments.
How many tools do you use to manage projects and interact with internal and / or external stakeholders?
Using too many tools complicates interactions for both customers and internal participants. Information gets lost in emails, charts and spreadsheets, leading to misunderstandings, confusion and delays. If you do not have a clear workflow and well-established feedback, you will run into problems with the transfer of work materials and version control. And if individual pieces of information about projects are stored on different platforms, you will not get accurate reporting and perfect results.
Replace these tools with a centralized repository for all project and collaboration data. A project management platform should serve as a single source of reliable information, keep all discussions in chronological and contextual order, and save you the trouble of manually merging data from different systems.
3. Achieve transparency of project statuses and work progress
Transparency does more than just keep projects running smoothly in terms of logistics.
There are several dangerous areas where difficulties often arise, and transparency can help you identify and prevent them. These could be the following key points:
Updating project status data
Feedback and agreement loops
Time tracking and billing
Updating the status data might seem like a little tricky. Somewhere in the mail they wrote, somewhere in the chat they mentioned, but over time, the work on sending messages about updating the status, drawing up reports and holding meetings is accumulating. Most professional service providers (36%) spend 2-3 hours a week on status updates. About 11% spend more than four hours each week.
How much time per week do you spend sending out status change emails, writing status reports, or holding reporting meetings?
Prioritizing the transparency of project progress data will save time and hassle for both your team members and your clients. Considering that the third most important reason for customer churn is the lack of transparent information about the status of the project, it becomes obvious the need for dashboards that clearly display all the statuses of the project. These dashboards will help you stay on track and stay consistent even if you face the difficulty and need to reschedule tasks.
Feedback and reconciliation loops can both make collaboration easier and hell. All professional services teams have to send materials for approval and receive either silence or so many feedbacks in response that it becomes simply impossible to sort out a huge number of corrected versions. In any case, the matter ends in a continuous hassle.
Choosing a single source of reliable information for all discussions and information about a project is the first and most important step in improving project transparency . Visual reconciliation tools also help you see all the changes made and take into account all the actions of stakeholders. Has this material been approved by the client? Or was it reviewed by the professional services team? Centralized storage of all relevant information will help all participants to act in a consistent manner.
Time tracking and billing is another area where professional services teams can save a lot of time through transparency. A third of survey participants (34%) admit that it takes them 2-3 hours each week to track billable hours. According to every tenth respondent (10%), he spends more than 4 hours a week on this.
Professional services companies have to manually keep track of hours worked and issue invoices, and they don't always get paid for that . Automating these tasks saves significant time that can be spent building customer relationships. Customer satisfaction rises when they see what they are billed for and can relate the time spent to the value received.
0 Comments