The Story of Agiledrop: Cultivating Strong Relationships with Clients
In the second chapter of the series, we wrote about the first challenge we encountered when defining our unique workflow, which was establishing a process for training newly employed developers to meet requirements needed to work as part of the client’s team. In fact, this was just one half of something more important that we had to be mindful of - building and maintaining a healthy relationship with our clients. This is what we’ll dive into in this chapter.
The Challenge
The first and foremost thing to keep in mind when providing clients with experienced and reliable personnel is actually having that experienced personnel. However, a strong and healthy relationship with clients also demands continuously ensuring this personnel’s top-notch performance and smooth communication with the clients.
Since our developers are integrated into various projects for various agencies or simply development teams at, let’s say, a publishing company, and are managed directly from the client’s side, we had to find a way to monitor their work and eliminate any possible friction before it transformed into a major issue for the client.
Playbook
Forming and cultivating strong relationships with our clients is something we encourage from day one. All new employees receive a copy of our “playbook”, a directional document outlining our workflow, best practices and basically everything they need to know when starting their job at Agiledrop.
This playbook includes a set of guidelines for working as a part of the Agiledrop as well as the client’s team. Before any specific instructions on time tracking, communication, tools or anything technical, though, there’s a helpful introductory principle that they’re familiarized with. We call it SHARD, which is short for:
- Stop - Take a breath and take a moment to remember that every interaction matters.
- Hear - Let the client tell their entire story without interrupting them. Sometimes, all we need is someone who listens.
- Apologize - As long as it’s sincere, you can’t apologize too much. Even if it wasn’t your fault, you can still genuinely be apologetic for the way your client feels.
- Resolve - Resolve the issue quickly and don’t be afraid to ask the client: “What can I do to make this right?”
- Diagnose - Get to the bottom of why the mistake or issue occurred, without putting the blame on anyone. Instead, focus on fixing the problem so that it doesn’t happen again.
As you can see, we take great care to always provide top-notch services to clients, even if the fault or mistake did not occur on our side, if we are swamped with projects and deadlines, if we are tired and fed up with a specific issue…. We suck it up and put the client first! The entire team is extremely committed and driven to deliver.
And, even though we operate as remote partners to our clients, we strive to make the relationship feel as personal as possible and to reassure the clients of our online presence. Our developers frequently and conscientiously inform the clients about when they start and get off work, and about any breaks they might have.
We're Your Remote Partners
Since our clients come from various countries, often with different time zones, we had to find a way to always be available for calls and daily standup meetings for clients, but also keep things fair for those working on open source or on projects for clients from the same time zone.
For this reason, we’ve implemented the rule that our offices are open between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., which altogether comprises 10 hours, while our effective working hours are between 7 and 7.5 per day.
These flexible working hours allow for at least 2 hours of overlap even with clients with the biggest time difference, such as those from the US. The developers who work on those clients’ projects are hence able to arrive at the office later and don’t have to work overtime just to be present for a call or a standup meeting, whereas the rest of the developers are able to arrive earlier and finish work earlier, but are still available to the client when they are needed.
Such a system also ensures an excellent work-life balance, which in turn also greatly benefits the clients, since our developers working as members of their team are consequently more motivated and perform better - it’s truly a win-win arrangement!
Motivation is crucial for a strong and successful team, and this is why we frequently organize team buildings, shared dinners and other fun events that strengthen the team, further improve the vibes in the offices and consequently make working at Agiledrop something every team member looks forward to each day.
Another major benefit for clients working with our A-team is that we operate as remote partners to the client’s team. This means that the client essentially gets a boost to their workforce without any additional costs such as recruitment, onboarding and equipment costs, health insurance, travel expenses, etc.
Furthermore, we spare clients the need to open additional offices in different parts of the world in order to effectively scale - it’s exactly like we’re there with them (except that we’re not, at least physically)!
Feast or Famine? Not with Agiledrop
A considerable concern for companies and agencies when it comes to remote staffing is “feast or famine”. This is realized as the need for extra developers for a certain project, whom you cannot hire as full-time employees, since they will turn into unnecessary burdens to your finances once that project is concluded and you will no longer need such an extensive team.
This is where we offer the perfect solution. Clients can hire our developers for the duration of the project, but, if they happen to need them for an extended period of time or again at a later time, that can be arranged as well. In this way, we can scale your team easily and efficiently, but only when it’s needed.
Usually, when hiring part-time employees or freelancers, your chances are quite limited. If your remote developer falls ill, goes on leave, or disappears in some other, unexplained manner, what can you do, really? Go through the tedious, wrought-out process of staffing a second time? Deliver a not-so-optimized product? Either way, your project and consequently likely your entire enterprise suffer because of this.
Fortunately, this is pretty much an impossible scenario when working with the Agiledrop team. Our reliable team is led by skilled development experts whose greatest talent lies in the recognition of the talent and skills of others. As such, you can always count on them to provide the people and solutions most suitable for a specific project from about 50 experienced and proven developers.
If a developer assigned to a certain project falls ill or goes on leave? No problem - we take utmost care to immediately provide appropriate replacements, ensuring that the client’s project is never at a disadvantage because of some uncontrollable factor. With such a diverse team, we can assure we will find the people with the best possible combination of skills and experience for any given project.
Cultural Breach - What's That?
Even though we come from a small, relatively unknown country in the European Union, our values and traditions are essentially the same as in other Western countries; hence, our developers are able to integrate completely into the client’s team. All of them are fluent in English and are extremely flexible; we can effortlessly and seamlessly adapt to different practices and cultures, and we immediately employ the client’s tools, communication channels and workflows.
We strive to eliminate cultural breach as much as possible, continuously reassuring the client that the developers working with them are not a separate entity, but rather an equal part of their in-house team. Of course, we also pay attention to respecting specific cultural norms and/or time zone differences. You will never get pinged by one of our developers during your day off!
Your Privacy Is Safe With Us
Besides ensuring smooth project delivery, we’re also dedicated to protecting our client’s privacy and any trade secrets. A very strict NDA is signed with all our clients as well as our employees and we make sure everyone respects and follows it.
We never reveal our clients’ identity to other clients and we never share the client’s documents outside the team assigned to their project (you probably noticed that we appropriately censored the photo above with the conversation).
Additionally, we’re extra careful when handling our or the client’s passwords and access to services, etc. - especially when working from home. To add an extra layer of security, we handle our passwords with LastPass or similar tools.
Hire 1, Get Access to 50
What’s also greatly advantageous for our clients is that with such a large group of developers working in the same workspace, the client always benefits from the collective knowledge of the entire Agiledrop team. As we shall see in the final chapter of this series (stay tuned!), we promote and reward knowledge-sharing and support between employees.
We already pointed out in the first chapter of this series that our workflow demands new employees are supported by their mentors and team leads, helping them with tasks that are beyond their current level of expertise; but this support is not only limited to the probation period or to less experienced developers.
Anyone can help anyone, as we firmly believe that a unique and fresh perspective can always be beneficial, and we encourage asking for help rather than spending copious amounts of time trying to solve the problem on one’s own. We encourage communication between employees and also with the client’s management team, we peer review our code, we seek and develop solutions together, as a team.
It’s like those really old commercials or sales offers - remember, buy one, get one free? Well, with Agiledrop, it’s more like - hire one, get access to the skills and experience of fifty!
Unsure about how to most efficiently scale your team? Need to augment your staff, but only for the duration of a certain project? Not to worry - reach out to us anytime and we’ll be happy to lend a helping hand and ensure the success of your project!
Other posts in this series:
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Our Training Program
- Chapter 4: A Company Culture That Benefits Both Employees and Clients
