D4P: Client Contact Guidelines

CS486 - Senior Capstone Design
Guidelines for Client Contact

Description
Face-to-face meetings, phone conversations, letters, FAX, e-mail, etc. are all effective means of communicating with the customer. The manner in which design teams interact with clients is subject to personal style and individual circumstances. Nonetheless, there are some basic considerations that should apply regardless of personalities, style, and circumstances. Such general considerations include:

Politeness
Professional courtesy - When asking for client's time prearrange a meeting or phone conference.
Punctuality
Professional personal appearance (at a minimum: slacks, shirt and shoes). If you are meeting at the client site, ask the client how they dress and what is appropriate.
Proper English grammar (both written and spoken) and spelling - Poor grammar and spelling gives the impression of ignorance and promotes loss of confidence, even if the speaker/writer is actually very intelligent.
All written documents (including FAXes) are typed or electronically reproduced on white plain paper and properly formatted.

Each team should keep a client contact log summarizing all interactions with the client (who was involved, when it happened, summary of discussion). In the real world, this provides a legal record of interactions; for this course, it provides me with documentation of your communication effort. Since you are already, archiving emails and status reports, these don't need to be noted --- or you can include a mention of them, but with a "see project notebook" note next to the entry.

This should NOT be posted one the team website, but should be included in the project notebook.