Clients and customers are the most crucial aspect of any business. To grow your business, you need to keep your clients happy and satisfied. If your existing clients are happy, they are likely to recommend your products and services to others in their network, giving you the benefit of free-of-cost marketing. But if your clients are not satisfied with your work or your product, your brand image could be negatively affected, hurting your sales volumes.
Successful entrepreneurs are those who understand the value of maintaining healthy client relationships. Building relationship with clients is their priority. All their other business operations and procedures are designed to develop strong client relationships in mind. From their pricing strategies and promotional offers to pre-purchase and post-purchase customer service, everything is done in a way that helps them build client relationships that last.
Different organizations use different ways to build client relationships. Some firms focus on their pre-purchase communication with clients, while others keep providing quality service long after the purchase has been made. The strategies used by any firm depend primarily on the phase the business is at and the industry it operates in.
If you are a service-providing company, your strategies would most likely overlap with another service provider, even though your company might be operating in a completely different sector. This is because all kinds of service providers have the same ultimate goal: to make their clients happy.
Building relationships with clients is an art that you learn as you get more exposure and experience dealing with clients. The more experiences you get in handling different clients, the more skilled you become in developing and maintaining strong client relationships. You learn what to prioritize more and what to let pass. You realize which strategies work and which ones are outdated. With this experience, you can also identify what kind of strategy is most suitable for your particular niche. Once you learn to develop client relationships that last, your path to success will be clear and less burdensome.
If you want to know how to build client relationships, you have come to the right place. In this post, we will be discussing different ways to build client relationships, regardless of which industry you operate in.
10 Ways to Build Client Relationships That Last
Client relationships are a sensitive topic for businesses. Let’s discuss how to build client relationships in ten different ways.
1. Focus on Communication
Maintaining communication with clients is essential for building strong client relationships. Clients feel valued and cared for when you stay in touch with them, even after they have already purchased your service. Giving them regular updates about the work progress or sending them a newsletter with special discount offers makes them feel special and want to continue to work with you. This is good for your client relationships.
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2. Be Positive
Successful entrepreneurs and marketers always maintain a positive attitude with their clients. If you are faced with a difficult situation, such as when the economy is bad or when your client complains about the quality of your service, you shouldn’t resort to negativity in the way you respond to them. Take their complaints seriously, and see what you can do to resolve the issues to maintain a healthy client relationship.
3. Treat a Client as an Individual
If you have signed a contract with a client company, it doesn’t mean you start treating your client as an entity and not as a human. Even if your agreement is with an entire organization, each client should be treated as an individual human being. Set your point of contact with one individual from every client company, and discuss the project with them frankly. Client relationships are professional.
4. Share Knowledge
It is good to think of your clients as your strategic partners. Their experience can contribute to your work, and their comments can add to your expertise. Do not think of your clients as being any less than you. They are specialized in their field of business, while you are at yours. They are taking on your services to benefit from your talent while learning from them about their skills. Sharing knowledge while working on a project with a client can go a long way in building and maintaining good client relationships.
5. Be Open-Minded
To build solid and long-lasting client relationships, both parties must be open-minded towards each other. Your client must rely on you as an expert in the field you are providing services in. Maintain a policy of frankness, honesty, and openness during your physical and online meetings. Exchange your points of view without hesitation so that you can work towards the best interests of your client and the project at hand.
In many situations, it feels tempting to be too agreeable towards your client, because after all, you want them to pay for your service on time. But that’s not the best attitude to maintain and can be counterproductive. It can even damage your reputation if you do not express your honest opinions from the start.
6. Exceed Expectations
The best thing you can do to build a good client relationship is to exceed their expectations. Deliver more than what you promise. If you can do this, your client may not only be delighted with your service but also start recommending your business to their personal and professional networks. This will serve as word-of-mouth marketing for your services.
7. Speak Your Client’s Language
Successful consultants can adapt to their client’s tone, methods, formality, and speaking style. If you only stick to your management and communication tools, your client might not feel too comfortable. If your client prefers video meetings, go for it instead of sticking to text messages alone. If your client chooses to meet in person for every discussion session, give their style more preference.
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8. Use Project Delivery Tools
Efficient project management is key to maintaining a good repo and building good client relationships. There are many tools available that can help you with your project management and delivery. Using these tools will also make you appear more professional, as they provide proposal templates, ready-made contracts, client reports, and invoice templates. They also make your workflow more transparent, so that it’s easy for your clients to track its progress.
9. Develop Appreciation
If you want your clients to feel happy working for you, look for moments when you can develop and show your appreciation to them for doing business with you. Do not be afraid to make adjustments to your work processes for the sake of appreciating your client’s style. Some clients really want to be part of each phase of the project, while others like to get in touch at the end of every milestone. Appreciate however they like to work and build a positive ambiance by appreciating their style.
10. Maintain a Professional Website
For any service provider these days, it is utterly important to have a professionally designed and regularly updated website. Smart business owners do not hire web developers to build a website for them from scratch. They use website-building platforms to create their websites on their own. This not only saves budget but also saves a lot of time.
Strikingly is a website builder where anyone can create a fully functioning and beautifully designed website in a few hours. We provide a user-friendly editor with a drag-and-drop interface that makes it super simple for you to add your website content.
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As long as your website has the basic information about your business, along with your official contact details, it can function as your one-stop virtual office and marketing platform. When your prospects and existing clients see your website, they should feel proud to buy your services. Making your clients familiar with your website is also an excellent way to boost your client relationships.
At Strikingly, we work day and night to keep our users satisfied with our tools and services. When your website is running smoothly, it is easier for you to focus on the other primary operations of your business.
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Most of the features required for building a basic website are available in our free plan. We have designed our packages at very affordable prices so that new business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs do not face difficulty building an online presence for their brand. Our goal is to let you create a website on your own, with complete support provided by our customer service team, without learning any coding or programming languages.
Hundreds of our users have been successful in building and running a website on Strikingly. If they can do it, you can do it too. Register for a free account with us and get started by selecting one of our ready-to-use website templates.
