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How It Works

DesignFacilitator's Client Feedback Tool works on the simple principle of inventorying the client's reaction just after a designer completes a task. This is done after key phases of a typical project when feedback can most help designers understand where and how to fine-tune their process to increase their helpfulness to the client. DesignFacilitator helps you decide when to send a survey, alerts you of replies, and tracks your follow-up when needed. This method is patent pending, US application number 12238217.

The Process

Step One: Collect Feedback

When starting a new project phase, the designer can review the feedback questions that they will ask the client after that phase is completed. This guides the designer to cover the issues important to the client. After completing the project phase, the designer uses DesignFacilitator's online Client Feedback Tool to send a simple email link to one of our highly customized surveys. Here the client can offer systematic and objective feedback related to the design process. Answering these few simple questions typically takes less than five minutes of the client's time. Note: Most surveys contain eight questions or less.

Step Two: Review Feedback

DesignFacilitator captures and organizes the client's feedback into several graphic reports. The designer can view full details of every response to an individual survey, or see trends and patterns of responses over time. This new information allows designers and firm leaders to spot extremes (both positive and negative) in time to be proactive about a situation.

Step Three: Follow-up

Here are just a few ways that this new information can be incorporated:

  • Identify where to fine-tune your design process for each client
  • Become aware of client problems when they first occur
  • Increase your designer's flexibility in helping their client
  • Identify where designer training will be most beneficial
  • Increase the client's sense of your firm's expertise and helpfulness
  • Understand where and when to applaud designers for their results
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How It Works for Firm Leaders

For decades, design firm owners have identified understanding clients as an important issue for business success. As your business grows, leaders are often removed from the daily activities our firms perform for our clients. Relying upon your staff to keep you informed about a client's satisfaction is almost always a recipe for disaster. Staff often doesn't tend to tell you what you most need to know. We lose touch with the daily issues of our client's projects.

Very few firm leaders have the time to keep track of every aspect of every project; after all, they have a firm to manage. So, problems develop, clients become angry and the staff is reprimanded while the design firm quietly suffers.

Contrast this basic dilemma with a firm using the Client Feedback Tool:

  • Designers understand their clients better
  • Clients can see a more attentive design firm
  • Firm leaders know immediately when and where problems exist
  • Problems are spotted early, when they are easier to solve
  • Leaders better understand the skill levels of their design staff
  • Staff performance is measured to promote excellence
  • Staff's successes are recognized to promote loyalty

All this can be done by using our tool to request feedback, view results, and incorporate the data to promote your firm's prosperity. In only minutes a day.

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How It Works for Designers

For a designer, understanding exactly what to do to meet the needs of each client, for each project, is a difficult challenge.

What makes this so difficult:

  • Clients preferences and priorities change and vary
  • Clients often do not identify their preferences and priorities
  • Designers seldom have time to inventory all their clients' needs
  • Designers are often held responsible for not working to all the needs of their clients
  • Clients often hold designers to standards that were never communicated to the designer
  • For designers, it's hard to be successful when success hasn't been defined

In a field where the educational requirements to become and remain a professional are substantial and too often outweigh the financial rewards, professional growth is often very challenging.

Firm leaders can seek to help, but cannot be there every step of the way. Designers hope to make it through each project without the sort of problems that undermine credibility, if not integrity, with their clients and coworkers.

DesignFacilitator has created a Client Feedback Tool for designers, that offers powerful benefits through the various phases of projects. This tool addresses four of the most critical aspects of a designer's work related to performance and satisfaction:

  • Understanding what each client wants and needs
  • Equipping Designers with results oriented data
  • Tracking the improvements made during a project
  • Publishing designer's successes

If your design firm is not using DesignFacilitator's Client Feedback Tool, contact us and we will introduce our tool and the benefits it brings to clients, design firms, and perhaps most importantly, the designers who are getting it all done.

CONTACT US

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