How Personal Values Became Our Quality Standard and Unlocked Long-Term Client Success

In the previous post, I wrote about how the new office marked not only a turning point in my journey as a leader but also in the way we worked with clients as we began to grow exponentially, took on increasingly larger projects, and successfully handled them.

It’s probably worth pausing to consider the personal value of quality and the pursuit of excellence and how all of this became intertwined with the company value—quality and one step further—which has remained to this day. The latter is perhaps marked in internal employee surveys as one of the most visible and truly noticeable within the company.

PUTTING QUALITY INTO ACTION

As projects grew and increased in number and complexity, I had already learned as a project manager that programmers make mistakes and are pretty lazy creatures who dislike testing the code they’ve written. At the same time, verifying the work required a considerable amount of my time. From company standardization training, I learned that I should focus on company growth and areas where I’m strongest—not on routine tasks that essentially don’t create value.

As profitability started to emerge, it became clear that we had to solve the issue of a fairly large number of mistakes, noticeable even by clients. And the answer was to create a new tester role in our company. It’s true that until then, I had probably delved least deeply into this specialty. Initially, it was scary to pay extra costs for an employee who seemed to “earn nothing” since their hours were not billable.

However, having internal “woodpecker”-like competencies not only fundamentally improved our company’s client satisfaction, but I dare say that we were probably the first of our size in Lithuania to include the tester’s service in our hourly rate. Later, other companies gradually tried to copy us, but in the end, they abandoned testers, leaving their clients to do the testing themselves.

I can be proud that even today, unlike other companies that essentially shift the tester costs onto clients and additionally charge them, at PrestaRock—even with perhaps a slightly higher rate—we typically have two to three testers who help our clients ensure that tasks are reviewed, verified, and error-free. At the same time, they provide high-level client service, where clients, having a unique service agreement complete with free added value for a small monthly fee, receive consultations on how to use the system, free updates, free bug fixing, and even PrestaShop core.

SETTING THE STANDARD: PROBABLY THE FIRST SLA FOR E-COMMERCE IN LITHUANIA

Gradually observing the market and learning from our accounting system partners, we noticed that clients had a high need for simple help using the system. And who better to do this than a technically educated tester, working at a programmer’s level, who is ready to answer questions from 9 to 6 every workday—whether it’s how to use a feature, what was forgotten, or just when they can’t figure out how to complete an admin task.

Here, I can almost guarantee that while the most prominent Lithuanian companies like NFQ had hints of testers as they developed large projects, we—with a team of just eight people—were probably the very first to have testers. In the PrestaShop field, I could almost swear we were the first in Lithuania to offer a service-level agreement.

Our support agreement included what was most needed: a response to critical errors within 1 hour during work hours (and even outside of work, on weekends or nights) and free consultation on how to use the system.

It took competitors nearly two years to adapt and copy this model until they began offering something similar. However, they included mandatory programming hours in their agreements. If the client didn’t use those hours, they became a benefit for the provider—which, in my opinion, isn’t very fair.

GOING ONE STEP FURTHER: WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE

I already mentioned in the previous post our success when we were not only the implementer who just executed what was said but also the company and executor who—thanks to my accumulated consulting experience—could tell the client what needed to be done in e-commerce.

Our company introduced services such as e-shop audits from the optimization (conversion—then a trendy word) and internal SEO perspectives. At that time, clients didn’t even understand the word SEO or what must be done to rank higher in search engines.

Initially provided completely free of charge as added value (one step further), our audit service was a document of nearly thirty pages compiling our accumulated e-commerce knowledge and experience in properly organizing the homepage, product, category, and cart processes of an e-shop. These were enriched with theory and research and real experience from completed projects—for example, when a renewed tire e-shop’s seasonal turnover reached the previous year’s annual numbers.

In addition to audits, we remained the consultants whom clients approached, saying, “You tell me what to want, and I’ll choose. ” And we did exactly that—meticulously, probably with two or three meetings a day—striving to educate Lithuania’s e-commerce knowledge base for project managers and developers, pushing even our competitors to evolve, who often lagged behind technically.

For example, even official partners, aiming simply to profit, gave biased consultations insisting on updating PrestaShop just for the sake of updating. And what does the implementer gain from that? Nothing—just expenses. Meanwhile, our team helped make cost-effective decisions and only carried out updates with substantial design improvements (a “facelift”) that significantly benefited sales. So the budget hit two birds with one stone for the same price.

SUMMARY

Even today, when we hire employees and explain what makes us unique and why it’s worth joining us, we tell them that the key to our success was the natural growth I experienced from programmer to project manager to analyst in the company’s journey—and, at the same time, the personal values that were transferred into the company. Some of these values were quality, one step further, and results—or, as I like to say, the pursuit of perfection—which helped us retain some of the biggest clients in Lithuania, who have been working with us for over a decade.

But were there clients who left us? What challenges are hidden in company growth and increasing bureaucracy?