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The Four Engagement Models for Our Clients

The business we’re in is achieving business results for our clients by enabling them to deliver contextually relevant and personalized experiences. 

There are many people within the company working on the integration plan, exploring the opportunities and challenges of combining the businesses. A common thread in the discussion is what business we are in? I would like to add some clarity to that concern. 

We have an “as is” and a “to be” state in the business that needs to translate to both sides of the Atlantic. If we all agree that enabling our clients to create and deliver better experiences for our customers then we need to think about how the various dimensions of our business work together to achieve that goal.

We have four types of engagement models with our clients… 

Staffing Support, Project Work, Digital Transformation and Managed Services/ALM 

Almost a third of our work fits into the category of staffing support. This includes contracts we have with the Dutch government, but it also encompasses all the work we do for clients where they are leading the engagement and we are providing skilled and expert services to support their project and business goals. These engagements are typically bound in time and will bill according to the hours worked. There are many reasons why this is a great business for us, two that I’d like to point out is that we are able to build a wide base of competencies in the company which can support many different initiatives. The second reason is that it a fairly consistent and predictable business, so when we are planning for growth it’s nice to have stability in our client base. While I don’t see this business growing as fast as the rest of our business, there is still a strong market supporting clients who need a trusted partner to provide expertise. 

Another third of our business could be called project work. This typically involves Tahzoo assuming the responsibility of the successful implementation of some technology or execution of a strategy project. In these cases, we are hired because of our expertise and experience solving similar problems for clients in the past. We try to use this type of work to engage in a deep conversation around organizational goals and initiatives to win additional work. In the US many of our accounts are just an ongoing series of projects drive toward the goal of better customer experiences. On the strategy side of the business, these projects often lead to a retainer-based relationship but stop short of digital transformation because they are one dimensional and/or they are only applicable to a portion of the business.  

About twenty percent of our business is true digital transformation work. In these cases, our clients have hired a dedicated multi-disciplinary team to support a transformational initiative. These are long term strategic engagements in which Tahzoo provides the full range of services over many years. As we have discussed, there is a lot of organizational change required to provide contextually relevant experiences, its journey.

The last category, managed services/ALM, is evolutionary.  Today it’s mostly about technical support.  But where we want to go with it, is to include marketing operations, run campaigns and marketing programs, ultimately ending up as a type of business process outsourcing (BPO) for digital marketing. 

Next week, I’ll start taking you through some of our ideas on how to get there.