Tyl & Spotless: Case Study For Successful Collaboration And Communication

Tyl by Natwest is a payment provider renting out card machines for small businesses. Tyl provides virtual terminals, payment links and online payment gateways as solutions for business owners to receive and track payments from their customers. Tyl benefits from next working day card transactions into merchants business bank accounts.

Through more than 25 hours of questioning and proposition testing with small and medium sized business owners, Spotless collaborated with two NatWest financial technology brands, Tyl and PayIt, to arrive at a set of recommendations to help improve their product and subsequent marketing/pricing of said product.

As an action off the back of our collective work Tyl was invited by Quirks, a global Market Research platform, to give a presentation highlighting the successful collaboration and communication between Tyl stakeholders and Spotless.

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The nature of the presentation, ‘Removing friction in remote research for faster, thoughtful insights’ illustrates how Tyl and Spotless collaborated and communicated as one team.

Doing so showed how we at Spotless embed ourselves within our clients challenges and ways of working to come together on a unified front, rather than the traditional ‘client vs agency’ relationship.

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Tips on effective stakeholder management

For those who wish to view the session presented by Nicola Charlton, Research and Insights Manager at Tyl, please find the link here

We have provided some helpful tips and hints for effective stakeholder management:

• Put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholders. Apply the same level of customer centred rigour and adapt this mindset
• Cadence of updates are crucial. Small and regular updates are more effective than drawn out and irregular updates leaving stakeholders in the unknown
• Consider how your stakeholders absorb information. As most of us are time poor and plate spinning, think creatively about how to obtain feedback in a short time period. Video platforms such as Loom work well for >5 min videos to walk through relevant documentation.
• Provide succinct and clear updates with no more than 3 key messages, whether these be project updates or next steps.
• Be proactive about problems that you may face. Be open and receptive to hosting calls to acknowledge the problem, assess options available and propose solutions with appropriate benefits and drawbacks to show you have explored multiple options.
• Set your boundaries and ways of working early on in the project kick off. Ensure everyone is onboard for what is appropriate to share on what platform and to whom.
• Learn the power of drafting messages, using templates and scheduling messages. The more prepared you are, the more professional and organised you will come across to your stakeholders.