It’s always important to look good in the clients eyes. You need to maintain credibility. Otherwise, you can easily lose repeat business. It is a complete tragedy when companies lose credibility over something like a document control process. Let’s take a look at three glaring mistakes that clients notice and really don’t appreciate.

The first thing is document access. Your clients want to be able to access documents on a self-serve basis. They want to see the latest, the previous revisions. They want to see the markups associated with those revisions, and the document history and the transmittal history and all of that. They want to find it readily available on a self-service platform. If you make them dig and you make them dig and dig and dig and find what they’re looking for, they’re going to notice, and they’re probably not going to appreciate it. At the end of the day, the client may not even look but offering the transparency says a lot of good things about how you do business.

The second thing is using your terms or unfamiliar terms rather than your client’s. When you’re using your document numbering system and making your client learn what you do and how you report, et cetera, rather than speaking their language, you may as well be speaking Klingon. They’re going to notice, and they’re probably not going to appreciate sifting through documents using your nomenclature or deciphering reports that cater to your internal needs and nomenclature.

The self-service using client numbering isn’t a huge one, but if you can provide them self-service so they can find things in terms familiar to them and review things in terms that are familiar to them, that’s really going to build your credibility an show that you have a robust management system. It’s probably going to give them confidence in the rest of your organization as well when you can interface at a high level right there.

The third thing is, if you’re reporting isn’t cohesive and you’re pulling reports from multiple systems and spreadsheets – you are going to run into problems. That method can easily lead to communicating conflicting data to clients. For example, if document Control reports engineering progress as 50% complete and the Cost Team reports engineering progress at 65% complete is going to raise some red flags. Clients will definitely notice that, and it will definitely affect your credibility. Unfortunately, this happens and even more unfortunately it is a pretty typical phenomena.

Often times we see companies operating at silos. Different teams will be doing their own thing. They use separate systems and departmental processes to complete work.  Then, when they need to report to the client, they’ll try to wrap it all together and put a bow on it, but the process as things get all wrapped up and things are made nice and the bows are put on, it can be pretty cumbersome.

If your client emails your mechanical lead and asks for a report and they submit their report, in the same day your client asks your document controller for a similar report and you both produce the reports in a timely manner, but the data is conflicting, they’re going notice that and call you on it. They’re going to ask some really hard questions. Having to deal with that at all can be very damaging to your working relationship with your clients.

This makes me think of a couple clients that we work with in particular. We work with companies from the top of the food chain form asset owners and operators to the bottom of the chain. A couple of our owner-operator clients were incredibly dissatisfied with their contractor and supplier performance on the document control front. So much so that they actually used ProjecTools application to eliminate all those headaches for themselves.

With some of their suppliers and subs, they never had access to the documents. When they did, it took forever to find what they were looking for. On top of that, the information was often outdated. Often times these owners had to rely on document controllers to go find and then polish and package and then deliver what those clients wanted.

Some subs obviously didn’t have their process together, so that process of finding, packaging, polishing, and delivering took forever. Then to boot, wrong revisions were delivered, reports didn’t make sense. They had to learn new numbering schemes just to deal with these subs.

The owner-operator had enough in this case. They use ProjecTools which sorted these problems out very, very easily. They forced some of their subs to manage documents in the owner’s system, which when you think about it is a pretty big reduction in autonomy. And it was all because of some pretty simple things like client-friendly numbering, self-service, and showing the right revs, and automated reporting.

Watch the video above to look at how to tighten up your interface and interaction with your clients so you can impress your clients and delight your clients and maintain very high level of credibility to maintain that autonomy.