Understanding the objective of the client goes a long way in customer satisfaction and retention. At GreyB, we are huge believers in fulfilling the objective of the client – rather than fulfilling just the objective of the project – and this attitude helped us a great deal in enriching the client’s experience and satisfying their needs.
Let me narrate one of the instances where we focused on helping the client achieve their objective.
Nick*, a patent broker, and an esteemed client, recently contacted us to work on a project. Nick was helping his client (a major firm) to acquire patents which were being infringed by a major Fortune 500 company. Let’s call the company ABD for the sake of this article.
The flow of the project was something like this –
What was our role in the project?
Well, Nick kept sharing different patent portfolios with us that were in his approach (being a patent broker). We were supposed to confirm its infringement with ABD and share our views with Nick. Based on our analysis, Nick would recommend his client to acquire those patents. So, our inboxes were flooded with many portfolios from Nick and we analyzed nearly 15-20 patent portfolios. Some of them were useful for Nick’s client, while others weren’t.
While this process continued, we thought – Why to restrict ourselves only to the analysis of patent portfolios that are shared by Nick?
Since we knew our client’s end objective, how can we share something more than what is expected of us?
We stepped up our game and went a step further than what was expected from us i.e. to analyze only the portfolios that he shared.
What did we do?
Well, we identified few more portfolios which were on sale and were related to ABD. We suggested Nick to look into these patents as they were potential for acquisition by his client.
Gladly, he contacted the seller of the portfolios as we suggested and later gave the patents to us for further analysis. Guess what, each of these patents was somehow being infringed by ABD’s products.
Claim charts were prepared and turns out, these patents helped Nick’s client get out of the patent infringement suit that ABD waged on it earlier. Acquiring these patents was a strategy used by Nick’s client’s IP counsel to save the firm from paying millions in infringement royalties.
Reportedly, both the companies settled the suit and cross-licensed their patents. Nick really liked the way we handled the case and gave us the following feedback.
“You guys never fail to exceed expectations. This was some of the best work ever.” -Nick
Thinking of it, it was a small effort at our end. But when we think of the bigger picture, this small effort had a major impact on a litigation suit worth billions of dollars. The story would have been rather different if we tried to limit ourselves to fulfilling the objective of the project solely.
Truly, understanding the objective of the client not only helped us improve customer experience, but we also derived customer satisfaction and got ourselves a loyal customer for life.
