Key takeaways from this article:
- Instead of a supplier–client relationship, we base our collaboration with you on mutual partnership.
- Our goal is to also pass on part of our know-how, which you can use in your future work.
- This type of collaboration saves you money in the long run, and we also get to know each other better. This allows us to deliver the best possible solutions — not only for your website, but for your entire business.
Collaboration that makes sense and develops your business
Whether long-term collaboration is built into the project from the start or gradually takes shape, we usually hand over the finished website along with a plan for further optimisation and continuous development.
We also expect that you will come to us with further requirements — for example for more advanced customer segmentation, help entering a new market, or reaching a new target group.
"Optimising and developing a website is a never-ending process. But we always make sure it is meaningful work that genuinely helps the client."
We build a partnership with you
Our goal is for long-term relationships with you to go beyond the supplier–client dynamic. We strive for partnership. This means that we do not just provide our services — we also educate and teach you so that you can handle certain tasks independently.
Of course, this mode of collaboration does not kick in from the very beginning. Partnership requires a high level of trust, which builds gradually. With clients where collaboration is closest and involvement is highest, however, we consistently deliver the greatest added value and the work is significantly more efficient.
Why do we pass on our know-how?
Sometimes it is because you yourself show an interest in deeper understanding of our processes and methods, wanting to learn them and better understand the outputs. The know-how you acquire can then be applied more broadly in your business — either you discover further applications yourself, or we advise you on where and how the method can be used. We teach you the process and consult with you on it along the way.
Other times, the transfer of know-how may be driven more by a pragmatic decision based on a limited budget. For longer-term projects, it can be worthwhile for us to teach you, for example, the in-depth interview method, and for you to conduct subsequent rounds independently. We then step in more intensively for evaluation and synthesis, from which specific solutions emerge.
In the long run, this saves you money. Conversely, for one-off testing this does not work as well, since a single round of testing takes the same amount of time as the initial training and shadowing. That said, it may still be valuable for you to bring that know-how into your team.
We will teach you to run user research
What we most commonly pass on to our partners is research know-how. The quality of outputs does not suffer — we only delegate tasks that we are confident you can handle and that we can hand over well. This ensures no distortion or inaccuracy in the data.
For example, when training you to conduct in-depth interviews, we proceed as follows:
- first, we train you thoroughly and teach you interview facilitation techniques,
- then we run the first interviews ourselves so you can observe our work and supplement your training notes,
- after that, you conduct interviews under our supervision,
- and finally, you run them independently — with our consultation and checks to ensure everything proceeds as it should.
We trained Top-obaly.cz in this way.
"At an initial meeting with Proof & Reason, we were shown how to conduct research interviews, how to structure questions and what to watch out for to avoid skewing respondents' answers. During the actual interviews, we also developed a way of thinking about questions so as to extract the maximum quality of information from each conversation."
We educate and build your team
When transferring know-how, we start from the experts you already have in your team. If there are designers, we can delegate some of the design execution to them. If there are copywriters, we help them understand the specific principles for creating content for our web solution so that it works as well as possible.
For example, for Czech National Agency for International Education, we created a document with principles for content creation and maintaining consistency across the website. We then gave them feedback on the content they produced, so they could put those principles into practice.
And if you do not have the right specialist and are looking for one, we will help you define the selection criteria and advise on what to look for when hiring. We can then also support the professional development of the new team member.
We optimise the website, but also internal processes
In a long-term partnership, we gain increasing insight into other areas of your business. Although we primarily focus on the website, in connection with website changes we also recommend, for example, optimising internal processes.
"We do not work in a vacuum — we work in the context of the entire service. And the longer we work with you, the more we can help not just with your website, but with your overall business."
The need for process improvements often emerges from website changes following usability testing. For example, during website creation we may notice that order picking and dispatch could be done more quickly. Or a logistics issue emerges from research and user feedback, from whose perspective the process does not work correctly.
We will pass user feedback on to you along with options and proposals for how to improve the processes. When designing a web solution, we always think about the entire service and how it can function even better. We focus on improving the user experience during the purchase or website usage. We also look for ways to reduce the burden on your internal team.
For S-Power, we worked on optimising the entire customer journey in this way. This allowed us to redesign the website in the context of the entire service and simultaneously recommend changes to marketing and parts of the service that we would not otherwise have had the opportunity to address.
What long-term partnership brings to both sides
By handing over know-how that we can confidently delegate, we free up our capacity for strategic tasks. And that is where we can bring you the greatest added value. In the long run, this also saves you money, while passing on important knowledge that you can apply further.
"We want to deliver maximum added value. By educating our clients, we fulfil this mission."
It benefits us too. When you want to improve, understand our work well and see the purpose behind it, it is easier for us to work together. It also builds your confidence in our work. This means you let us deeper into your business, which we get to know better — allowing us to offer ever-better solutions.
Long-term partnership is the ideal state we want to achieve with our clients. That is why we will most likely talk about it from the very start of our collaboration and help you prepare for it. It requires trust and a willingness to work on improvements together with us, but it delivers outstanding results.
