Handling Clients in a Design Agency

The thrill of pitching, winning and managing a client is like a roller coaster journey with a lot of ups and downs. When you're a Growth Consultant in a design agency, managing client's expectations wins you your bread and butter. Although, with every client having varied requirements, it's important to carefully manage the same. Working at Lemon Yellow, here are 6 tips I learnt along the way that I would like to share:

1. Do the groundwork
   Here, we believe in knowing each and every detail of the process, functioning, and brand while designing. Knowing about the specifics always helps me take on a new briefing call with the client or the team with clarity and confidence. Once you've understood it, it becomes a lot easier for you to understand and make conversation or give definitive suggestions.
    
2. Understand the end user
   Our spunky design team believes that understanding the needs of the end user and not just the client's is when you would truly fulfill the purpose of the product/ service. Identifying what the end user requires, along with the inputs given by the client is the responsibility of a UI UX agency and to merge both beautifully is what we do best!
    
3. Understand the process
   Lemon Yellow being a design-lead UX agency, inculcates processes and systems that are rather creative, systematic and innovative. Because we work for the end user who's going to use a particular service, we sit and understand even the tiniest details which concern the user. Explaining this offbeat process to the client from the very beginning is always beneficial.
    
4. Don't over-commit
   Being aware of your agency's potential and bandwidth gives you a clear picture of the things your agency can and cannot do. Not speaking up and agreeing to all requirements of the client would land you in a difficult spot and maintaining ‘Transparency' is one of the Core Values of Lemon Yellow. We'd rather be upfront rather than suffering later. And over-promising and under-delivering is always a big turn off for any company. To avoid this, you can communicate the services and resources you offer crystal clear at the very beginning and say no to things that are unreasonable or unachievable with the current set of skills and people.
    
5. Keep up with trends
   Apart from focusing on User-Centric design, our team of designers, developers, content writers, editors and growth consultants are up to date with all recent trends going around in the UI UX space. Keeping up with the trends helps the entire think out of the box and with a futuristic approach.As a part of our company culture, we encourage knowledge sharing and blog reading. We conduct something called Learning Saturday that provides a platform for sharing information and trends from different fields that finally connects to UI and UX.
    
6. Be process and culture driven
   Amongst all the chaos and things happening rather quickly, it's important to actually be what you stand for. Our team does not let go of its culture and its processes even when the going gets tough. In fact, there are the only two things that form the foundation of Lemon Yellow - Colour & Culture. Colour is all about design, skills and processes while Culture is about the values, bond and philosophy that makes LY what it is.

Enclosing, I would like to say that Lemon Yellow has made me a better professional and taught how to handle clients while managing the team in a Design Agency.