compel your clients to provide more background on the project for which they need experts.
Currently, most requests for expertise give a list of nouns that the client envisions describes their requirements. But this is insufficient for experts to understand their needs. Zintro should compel clients to describe their projects (subject to confidentiality) and give a more complete RFP, including such things as level of expertise (i.e., is this a junior position, a senior role, or an expert role that commands an expert's pay scale).
I feel that I am responding to most RFPs completely blind and I am losing patience with the Zintro process.
jeff-stollman
shared this idea
Clients are now asked to provide more information depending on the type of inquiry they submit. We will continue to work on improving it to make sure you have all the information you need to qualify the project.
Our new easy to use Conversations lets you start a conversation more informally, without masking and without any limitation. Ask away!
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Roberta
commented
Offers should include specific details so we don't waste time going back and forth with companies that are just fishing.
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Suzette Iskander
commented
Zintro should have a questionnaire to each client to fill before they post his project, which cover most of the information the expert need to know before she/he will accept the project.
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jeff-stollman
commented
I often ask additional clarifying questions, but seldom get a reply. I suspect that the clients are interested in offers, not questions. This has reduced my inclination to respond to many inquiries. And their behavior may be resulting in reduced satisfaction with the expert they hire, since there was no true "meeting of the minds."
This could reflect in Zintro's lack of repeat business from such clients.
Prompting clients to give more information in the first place seems to be of benefit to everyone.
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Anonymous
commented
One key piece of information missing in most inquiries is a location. There is not even a country specified let a lone a city or county/state.
Usually it is not even possible to get an idea from the clients profile of location as the link is not active...
Can you please make specifying location information a pre-requisite of posting an inquiry? It could automatically be pre-filled with the clients location.
Obviously the availability and knowledge of an expert will vary across the globe, as will technology and standards, so this it is essential to match the client and expert satisfactorily.
Thanks
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Thank you for your suggestion.
I agree that often times inquiries don't give enough information for an expert to determine whether there is a good fit or not. In our inquiry forms, we try to encourage clients to share details. Some do and some don't.
It if very possible that these clients have needs for a consultant, stumbled across Zintro on a search engine and just want to give it a quick try to see if there are viable experts on the other side.
One action experts can take is to send a quick zNote asking for additional clarfication about the inquiry. That can be quite helpful (and doesn't cost either party and money).
Also, we are building a next generation routing system that will provide a lot more flexibility for the experts and clients. It will allow the experts to specify the amount of information required for an email notificationand zMail to be sent to them. It will also urge clients to share more information in order to have their inquiries distributed more quickly and to a more highly target set of experts.
There are a number of different expert strategies. We find that some experts like to respond to all inquiries while others only want pre-qualified inquiries. We want to address both user types.
I hope that provides some insights into our thinking. Please keep the suggestions coming.
Thanks.
--Stuart
Founder & CEO, Zintro, Inc.