Client management is one of the most important aspects of running a business. It’s not enough to simply obtain or produce products and sell them to customers. It is equally important to take care of your customers or clients, to make sure that they get an accommodating experience that will make them want to become repeat customers or patrons.
Consider the following tips to achieve excellent client management.
Use a Client Management Software Tool
To ensure good client management, it greatly helps using a software tool. With this, it becomes easier and more efficient to handle client concerns and manage client requests. This significantly contributes to building a good business reputation while raising sales and ensuring client satisfaction.
Client management software allows you to be more organized in the way you deal with your clients. It lets you keep track of important metrics such as the frequency they buy something or the product variants they prefer. It helps ensure client or customer engagement. More importantly, it creates a dependable platform for promptly and objectively addressing client concerns and complaints.
Many client management tools available nowadays provide a good range of features and functions to enhance the way you deal with current and prospective clients. These include the ability to communicate with clients, a method for ensuring transparency, as well as an integrated customer relationship management function or module. Take note that having more features is not always better. When evaluating software, it’s important to focus on your business needs and adopt an intuitive software so your learning curve doesn’t take months. For this reason we see more and more businesses turning to general management and collaboration software such as monday.com to manage their clients as opposed to more complex and robust “pure CRM” softwares such as Sugar, Sap or Salesforce.
Set Goals, Expectations, and Detailed Plans
It’s important to have a comprehensive plan for what you intend to happen as you deal with clients. This is particularly necessary when it comes to service-based businesses and companies that engage in major contracts. It’s important to align your goals with what the client wants to achieve. Likewise, it is important to know what the client expects and inform the client of what they can expect from you. Moreover, it is vital to draw a detailed plan of how to go about achieving your goals and expectations. This detailed plan should include timelines and, as much as possible, the quantification or assigning of pecuniary values for everything that will be undertaken.
Establishing goals, expectations, and detailed plans is very useful as you can conveniently point to these whenever a client makes last-minute changes or requests. They serve as excellent guides for the timeline of the completion of a project or the delivery of a product. If there are changes, you can always justifiably ask for adjustments in the timeline or in other aspects of the project to accommodate the requests for modifications. This organization will impress your clients and make them trust that you will be honest about the time frame it takes to complete the project in an exemplary manner.
Be Transparent
Transparency is one of the most important things clients appreciate when they deal with businesses. As much as possible, everything that happens in the course of completing a project or manufacturing a product should be communicated to the client. If there are changes, the client should know. The client should be able to reasonably obtain relevant information while the project or production is in the process. Additionally, if you are unable to complete the project according to the agreed timeline, it’s advisable to communicate this to the client.
Transparency is vital to avoid complaints when it’s time to submit the output of a project or the delivery of volumes of products agreed upon. This will eliminate the issue of wrong specifications or misinterpreted details for the project specs. If you are planning to use a client management software, you may want to choose one that allows clients to sign up for a secure account and be able to access real-time information about the project or product they are commissioning. Some client management software also provide collaboration functions.
No Such Thing as Too Much Communication
Communicating with clients is always a welcome thing to do. It’s unlikely that you will commit the fault of “over-communicating’ unless the clients themselves tell you that they don’t want a lot of discussions or updates. If you are using a client management software, it usually comes with tools for communicating with clients so make good use of it.
Moreover, it’s important to make sure that your communication with the staff of your client is actually reaching the actual client. Ascertain that the staff actually reports everything you communicate to their managers and that the staff are actually responding with instructions or authoritative responses from their bosses.
Slight Low Balling or Under-Promising Can Be Good
When committing to clients, it is advisable to set the bar low when it comes to completion or delivery. With this, you get to impress the client when you complete a project before the agreed time or provide more than what you have promised. Always provide some allowance for possible glitches that may affect your projected completion or delivery time.
Make sure that you don’t overdo the low balling, though. You definitely don’t want other clients to perceive your business to be not competitive enough. Strike a good balance. Look at what your competitors are promising and come up with terms and timelines that are attractive enough but with enough allowance (under-promising) to compensate for possible problems that may be encountered. Of course this is not a strict guideline. If you really need to win a client, you may forget about low balling and offer the maximum capacity you can offer, as long as you are sure that you can satisfactorily deliver what you promise.
Ascertaining good client management is something every business should emphasize. This is not only for the benefit of clients but for the success of a business. There has to be an organized way of contacting, dealing and communicating with clients as well as in addressing their concerns and making sure that they are satisfied so they will continue patronizing your business.
