Engaging with Esports Clients — A Student Consultant’s Perspective
Why client engagement is important and how best to do it, through the lens of a practicum project with an esports company
Client is a term often associated with consulting settings but the truth is that clients are everywhere. For product companies, their customers are the clients (an individual in a B2C company and a business in a B2B company). For CPG companies, it is the common person who purchases their products time after time. Irrespective of the setting, there is a client that has needs, which require to be addressed by the company.
If addressing their needs is the destination, engagement is a means to that end.
In the previous article, I analyzed the concept of teamwork with the help of excerpts from my practicum project as part of UC Davis MSBA with Knights, an esports team based out of Pittsburgh. In this article, I will once again leverage my experiences with Knights to analyze what client engagement is, why it is important and how one can practise good client engagement.
Client Engagement — What?
I hate to say that it is engaging with clients because you know that already. What does it mean to engage with clients and how is it different from communicating with them?
Sure, communication is a part of engagement. In client engagement, however, the communication is not restricted to just sending timely updates or gathering requirements. It is when we go one level deeper and understand why they require what they require. It is when we explain to the clients why we are doing what we are doing.
Dealing with clients is difficult, but not because of the populist notion that they are “unreasonable”. That is simply not true but there are exceptions everywhere. Dealing with clients is difficult when the clients and consultants speak different languages. My clients, for example, speak the language of online gaming. If we, as consultants, were to resort to speaking in the language of analytics, we would never truly be engaging with them. Part of being a consultant is to be able to speak the language of clients as well. Only then, we achieve true engagement.
In my practicum, we made sure the clients are in their comfort zone with respect to communication. As an esports company, they prefer communication over Discord rather than emails. They speak in the language they are comfortable with and we ask them questions if we need further clarifications on any of the gaming jargons. And when we communicate with them, we make sure we thoroughly understand our work to begin with, so that we are able to explain it in a way that they would be comfortable to listen to. We question every metric to understand how that helps them evaluate a player or a team. Asking the right questions goes a long way in client engagement. But then the question arises — why do we even need to engage with clients?
Client Engagement — Why?
No project has a linear trajectory in the sense that we collect requirements in the beginning and keep communicating updates to them till the project is done with. In fact, the initial requirements are mostly vague and they are not written in stone. They are only written on paper. It is impossible for the clients to have an end-to-end blueprint of the project and communicate requirements once and for all. Businesses are dynamic and requirements change over time. It is key for consultants to understand the core client need that gets projected as requirements. The evolution of this core need transpires into changing requirements over time. While constantly changing requirements can derail the project, they can be made sense of by understanding the evolution of the client’s core need.
My practicum team identified that our client’s core need was to optimize their scouting processes. Which is why they needed a centralized data warehouse with dashboards on top that have all their required metrics in one place. Optimization was their core need. On top of this core need, they had revenue growth in mind where the insights provided by our dashboard would enhance their coaching and scouting strategies. If we are to add value to their business through our data product, we need to give them insights that the stat websites do not. This is where adding custom heat-maps and other custom visualizations come in, which is what we have been ideating about lately.
Ideally, there needs to be client engagement in every step of a project. Clarity and transparency about the status of the project helps manage their expectations as well as build the consultants’ reputation as credible people to work with. Which is why, it is important to know some good practices in client engagement.
Client Engagement — How?
Somehow I do not feel qualified to declare and generalize the best practices for client engagement. But what I can definitely attest to are the practices that we follow in our project, to the best of our knowledge, in order to ensure productive client engagement. Following are few of the best practices we employ in our project:
- Reading and learning about the esports industry so that we understand most of the gaming jargons
- Communicating on a platform that the clients are comfortable with (Discord)
- Not using jargons when we explain our data engineering, analysis and visualization work to them
- Constantly question their needs in an inquisitive way to understand why they require what they require
- Keep ourselves updated with the company’s activities outside of the project so that we never lose sight of the big picture
- Actively wanting to get involved with several people in the company to make sure our product gives them the value that it should
In every aspect other than the source of payroll, consultants are employees of the company they consult for. The more we show to the clients that they actively care about the company as a whole even outside the domain of the project, the more we open the doors for quality exchange of information between the two parties.
Beyond all the biweekly calls, powerpoint presentations and quarterly reviews, there is a place where a consultant can achieve true engagement with the client. Discovering that place could be hard, but once we reach, there is no going back.
