3 Ways We Avoid Playing "Broken Telephone"

Here you are, you’ve decided you’re going to outsource a couple of aspects of your design, and/or marketing work. You’ve put your grown-up pants on and decided that your team can’t do everything, and you want them living their best lives, doing what they’re great at. More than that, you decided against dying the death of a thousand papercuts - hiring multiple freelancers - and decided to get yourself an agency. You’re considering a remote agency, but… how do you make sure that they’re doing everything? And doing it the way you want? How do you know that what you asked your main point of contact for will be well understood by the people actually doing the thing? Will the design team understand the delightfully funny anecdote you provided that perfectly explains your main value proposition and your customer personas all in one fell swoop? This kind of anxiety can keep a lot of smart, well-intentioned business people from pulling the trigger on what can be an incredibly rewarding professional partnership that can have incredible impacts on their ability to achieve that atmospheric growth that they’ve been looking for.

So, we’re going to give you a sneak peek on the 3 main ways that Flying Saucer eliminates any chances that we’re playing the worst game of broken telephone. Ever.

1. Consistent communication

Communication is important no matter what team you’re playing for, even if it means talking to yourself on occasion. No? Just us? Fine, but you can’t deny that “communication skills” makes its appearance on resumes for a reason. According to an article called Top 10 Email Blunders that Cost Companies Money, miscommunications cost smaller companies (100 employees or less) up to $420 000 per year.

Different people require different amounts of input and feedback, and the same can be said for different clients. We’ll try to tease those apart: 

Within the team

One of the most important ways that we eliminate this is by being in constant communication within the team. It’s all about communication skills within the team itself - and as a completely remote digital design studio, we don’t bring on people who can’t communicate. We’ve got a team that understands that time zones, competing priorities, and complicated workflows means going incommunicado for any length of time is just completely off the table. Unless you’re like, sick or something, and then it’s just about setting expectations, right? #WorkLifeBalance

With our client

When it comes to our clients it’s about concentrating all of our clarifications and questions and putting them to the client through the Project Manager - they come into play later. Also, it’s about making sure our clients know that we’re available! We never want them worried about being that client. You know the one we’re talking about. But when you’re working with any outside agency, if you’ve got questions or concerns, share them with your contact as early in the process as you can! It can really ensure that you get a product that you’ll be praising from the rooftops without any nasty timeline delays. And that’s what we want - your success is our calling card!

2. Project Manager + Creative Director = GOLD

Our project management team is relentless (in a good way, we swear!) when it comes to cracking that whip behind the scenes to make sure we deliver a quality product, on time. When you pair that with a Creative Director who’s got an eagle eye on your branding guidelines - asking questions like, “Did you squish that logo? DID YOU?” and, “Is that the right typography? I feel like we wouldn’t use Comic Sans…” and you’ve got a dynamic duo designed to diligently dedicate themselves to your details. #AlliterationForTheWin

BONUS: Check out our list of top 5 FREE project management tools that we use to stay in touch, and stop on top of our projects - with not a broken telephone in sight.

3. Include concerned parties

We don’t believe in designing in the dark, so our process is incredibly collaborative. You get to validate the process at multiple checkpoints to make sure that the project is a) on track from a time perspective and b) heading in the right direction aesthetically and creatively. The only way for us to effectively do this is to make sure the people who are doing the work are there to receive your feedback. Our design team are incredibly dedicated to customer satisfaction and that means they’re eager to hear your input directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. We’re not saying you’re a horse, we’re just saying there’s no loss in translation thing happening here. You know what we meant, right?

There you have it, folks - our not-so-secret sauce behind how we, as a completely remote digital design studio, manage to work with top-notch, innovative start-ups, to completely smash their growth goals.

Have a project in mind that you could use some outside help with? Book a quick call with our Client Success Specialist.