Client Success Stories: Building Effective Relationships
The first step towards a successful client relationship is to “know your client.” If you have no idea about their vision, expectations, and business behaviors, it will be difficult to meet their needs. These are the factors that lead to client success stories. If you know your client well, you can build a long-term, mutually successful relationship.
Table of Contents
Client-Effective Solutions
The first and foremost quality in any service provider is consistency. It is as vital as blood to a human body. The need of the hour when it comes to IP is an effective client solution. Most companies try to offer multiple services and solutions; however, nothing works better than an integrated and customized model for project deliverables, which is also consistent with the client’s standards and requirements.
The client, a world-renowned travel accessories maker, asked for an arrangement that will not only deliver the standard projects but also deliver them at an unparalleled turn-around time. The solution lay in thinking differently, and more deeply, about the client’s needs. Accordingly, the Sagacious IP team developed a solution to provide a resource well-equipped with both technical and IP expertise.
Challenges and Solutions
The resource was just one step taken towards the real challenge of tailoring an arrangement to help the cause. The next thing was an interview call wherein the client judged the caliber of the nominated resource in order to fulfil company’s requirements. A testing process was followed in which the nominated resource was put on the live projects to check their reliability and applicability.
The client was highly impressed by the results. The Sagacious IP team recognized the client’s needs and came up with several unique solutions to reduce TAT like a short email initiation and reports, regular client connects, uploading results directly to the required portal, carefully forged mini-landscapes and FTOs, regular online tracker updates, short interim reports in-between the projects, hourly billing along with the flexibility of shifting of hours between the month and so on. The successful testing phase resulted in client site visit for product training where the analyst got a clear picture of the products and requirements to engage full time with the client. These are crucial elements that lead to client success stories
Our Approach
Following is a snapshot of the approach we adopted for this client.
- Unmatched TAT: The results of this model were interesting as TAT was quick while maintaining the quality of the projects, which benefitted our customer not only in terms of project delivery but also in efficient billing rates as each project and monthly analysis were available for the client to monitor and adjust the costing.
- Client-Site Visit: In this arrangement, the customer-site visit proved to be a vital cog as it filled the communication gaps by calibrating the needs of the customer to what we delivered. Under the direct guidance of the client, the analyst was able to understand the thought-process of the client, its several products, and the path on which they were planning to walk upon.
- Nailed the consistency: Single point of contact for the deliverables ensured consistency and a firm grip on the domain that helped both client and analyst to understand the technical aspects over short calls.
- Tracker to rescue: The online tracker helped the client to keep the project inflow while being able to plan the urgent ones more carefully.
- Effective deliveries: In terms of guiding each project in the right direction, the continuous interims over the email played a seamless role and allowed both the client and analyst to be on the same page. Delivery of reports via emails meant more hours in a more fruitful search, which indirectly saved time.
- Out of box billing hour management: The buffer hour system also helped the client to manage the billing hours wisely while ensuring that he was paying for the used hours only. This buffer system allowed the client to shift a fixed number of unused hours to the next month. The client was also provided with the provision of using additional billable hours apart from fixed hours to allow the client to have flexibility in sharing urgent projects at any time in a month even when the allotted hours were exhausted.
- New domain & undisputed trust: This successful and wise engagement, assisted by mutual trust, made the client share a critical project related to an analysis of the patent portfolio, which he used to check and enter a new portfolio altogether.
- Regular connects for a smooth process: In order to discuss the status of running projects and upcoming assignments, we tried to connect with the client as often as possible. We also discussed the inputs on previously shared results as we prepared for the coming weeks.
- Type of projects and twists:
- Novelty/Prior art/Validity/Invalidity search: Quick delivery times, regular updates, interim reports and reports over the email are what enable the client to adjust the scope of searches as per his requirements. However, detailed reports are provided where it is required for the client.
- FTO/Landscape Searches: Carefully performed mini-landscape and FTO searches were part of the arrangement where the client had the freedom to customize deliverable searches within 4-5 days, while normal searches take about 10-15 working days.
- Patent portfolio analysis: This was the biggest milestone that played a huge role in the roadmap of our client’s goals as they were able to understand a fresh portfolio to enter a new market. This indicated an impact when we started receiving searches on inventions related to this portfolio.
How Sagacious IP Shaped the Outcome
Flexibility, quality, and real-time quick delivery were our key tools, whereas the efforts were focused on delivering the report in or before the allotted time. Also, email reporting was very successful as it saved the time of both the analyst and the client. The Sagacious IP team was able to contribute a bit to the client’s patent data collection. The seamless understanding, swift delivery of interim reports and final set of documents via emails saved a great amount of time in accessing the results – followed by quick replies of clients. Many clear and well-thought strategies enabled a thoughtful design of important processes to boost efficacy and efficiency of the client.
Connect with Us
At Sagacious IP, we are focused on helping our clients win and support them to achieve their goals. We understand that strong client relationships are not built in a day. To build lifelong and effective client relations, it takes active communication, timely delivery, and top-notch quality. We believe in treating our clients as our family and getting to know them as much as we can to yield better results and come out with more client success stories.
Reach out to us to get tailor-made solutions to your specific project requirements.
-Parteek Saxena, Nitin Sharma (Engineering) and the Editorial team