Forget the traditional design agency dynamic. At Blue Meta Design, we believe in fostering collaborative partnerships that go beyond the project at hand. We achieve this through a commitment to transparency, flexibility, and a deep understanding of your goals. This intro sets the stage for our exploration of how BMD prioritizes building long-term success with our clients.
Workflow, Communication, Organization
Client Choice PM Software
To fully integrate into the workflow that works best for our retainer clients—we give the option to be added to our project management software or for the client to add Blue Meta Design (BMD) to their project management software of choice. This allows for the client to have full visibility into project status and all project communications. Any setbacks, overages, or gray areas are easily navigated through with this level of transparency.
Source: This is from BMD’s workload view in a client’s ClickUp.
Zoom
Team and client meetings have had to make a great transition as most of the world went WFH in recent years. BMD utilizes Zoom, along with so many around the world (it’s been downloaded by more than 38 million users).
Zoom encourages meaningful collaboration and has increased our engagement as a team as we work from different cities, and helps to build and maintain the trust of our team to a client’s team. If a quick call is needed, Zoom and Slack can be integrated together, and Slack has a useful feature for a quick huddle, which will be discussed in the next section.
Slack
At Blue Meta Design we encourage our clients to add our team to their preferred communication/productivity platform, to provide a quick communication channel. Or, we can also add them to our preferred platform—Slack. Slack allows BMD and our clients to connect across departments, other companies, and multiple time zones. (BMD has clients across the world—including Germany, Paris, Israel, and India).
Slack has many features, but one that our team uses daily—a huddle. Huddles allow anyone added to BMD’s channel to request a quick sync via the touch of a button. Our team and clients are able to see who is online and available via slack statuses, which help when needing these kinds of quick connections. There are also many application integrations available from our favorite tools that aid in allowing quick touch base with less formality.
Source: A snapshot into BMD’s slack channel.
Cloud Content Management
At BMD, we utilize Box to store and organize all of our internal and client-facing files. We’re always happy to work with what our clients use and be added to their content software of choice, but Box provides a few useful workflow bonuses:
- Collaboration with anyone, anywhere, on any device. We add any requested team member or collaborator, to a specific folder and revoke access when/if needed.
- Advanced security controls, intelligent threat detection.
- 1,500+ app integrations
Team Email Integration
BMD also offers retainer clients the opportunity to add their BMD project manager to their company’s email account. This creates a seamless communication experience for a larger corporation client. This also allows our team to be integrated into software as a seat on the client’s team, with no access issues or delays in feedback or workflow interruptions.
Weekly Recap Emails
Each week, BMD project managers send out a recap email to each client. The email includes the following breakdown:
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- Pertinent PTO/Vacation updates for the week. If a team member will be out or communication needs to be directed to another team member, this is the place we would note it.
- Retainer used/remaining.
- Project Summary by task with descriptions for each.
- Action Items
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Setting Up & Maintaining the Relationship
Set and Manage Expectations
Blue Meta Design always wants to deliver the best end results. To do so—It’s imperative we set expectations from the start. Setting expectations helps in building and maintaining the best client relationships.
Setting and managing expectations is not all based on the quality of services rendered. An important starting point is cost. BMD has a clear agreement set in place before any work is done, to ensure the client understands cost now and what costs could be accrued if additional work is needed at any point.
Trust is built by the honesty we bring forth in the beginning stages and throughout discussions of scope of work. If a client needs something done in a timeline we would not be able to deliver the best product in, we are transparent with the timeline we could do, or extra charges that could accrue for rush work. This leads into another key aspect to expectations: Process.
Process
Some of our clients have never worked with a design agency, or one that offers as many services as we do. To help clients understand our timelines, team, project timelines, etc.—we go over the processes we have in place.
Some of the processes we have in place, include:
- Discovery/Onboarding
- Flexible scheduling
- Communication and meeting expectancy
- Stakeholder contacts and feedback expectations
- Development
- Reporting
- Project execution and wrap up
Understanding Clients Needs
At BMD, from the very first kick off call, we try to really dig in and understand the clients goals from a project standpoint but also as an organization and long term aspirational goals. We have created a tool shed of intake forms, checklists, and helpful documents for each of our clients. Understanding the short term and long term goals help in building the trust and knowledge needed at a foundational level.
Speaking of short term goals…At BMD (and most agencies)—broad spectrum projects start with a creative brief. Creative briefs are not just a fancy design agency doc—they’re a project need. CBs allow us and every stakeholder to be aligned with their needs before any work begins with our team. They can also help us to justify why an extended timeline may be needed and how it can be beneficial to the client. Further allowing the most optimal outcomes.
We try to retain clients with the goal to be the agency still working with the client when they get to building upon those aspirations. Growing with and helping grow our clients’ presence is rewarding for the full team.
Adaptability
As previously mentioned, BMD has a set tool kit of what we use for workflow, communication and organization. However, our main goal with any of our preferred tools is to allow a seamless and easy to navigate workflow for ourselves and the client. We have the flexibility to use a client’s preferred method or software.
Valued Personal Relationships & Empathy
We’re experienced and agile at BMD. Maintaining a professional repertoire is important, but so is our personal touch with having a tighter team and maintaining high-value clients. We truly believe in the impact our clients have made and will make in the world and try to hold empathy with our day-to-day decisions around client work.
Empathy allows our team to see and understand any of the clients concerns and address them accordingly—leading to even more trust. But empathy isn’t just extended to our clients. At BMD we have cultivated an empathy driven remote workplace. By showing empathy within our agency, we maintain a better sense of wellness as a whole, compassion for others, and gives us the ability to better handle stressful situations and navigate through tough decisions or harder to grasp concepts.
