Your client is all about them, and their experience as your client, and rightly so.

  • It’s about the WOW factor
  • It’s about going the extra mile
  • It’s about going over and above

Don’t make it hard for your clients to find what they need when dealing with your business. Ask yourself, “Are my clients feeling the love?” Check out my tips below on what you could do to continue to foster and improve your client relationship.

Great website

It’s not a hard thing to do, but it’s not often done. We still, in a lot of cases, don’t build a website with our clients in mind. We pick colours that don’t resonate with them, we write pages and pages of text, we don’t use graphics and we make it difficult for them to find anything. Make sure you do regular reviews of your website. It is a wonderful resource and tool for your business but needs to be regularly reviewed and maintained.

Listen – it’s easier said than done

How many of us actually listen to our clients, not just to the verbal but to the unspoken? How good are we at reading between the lines? How intuitive are we to reading between the lines?

The art of listening is a skill, not everyone can do it well. You can though, with practice and patience. This is an important skill that will help you grow your business and allow you to nurture and foster closer relationships with your clients.

You don’t know unless you ask

Always assuming you know it all is a flawed thought process. Your client knows what they like (most of the time) but they also lean on you to introduce them to new ways of doing things, new tools, new applications, new processes that they and their business will benefit from. You need to look and ask constantly. This is important to furthering and building your business relationship.

Trust is a must

Your client trusts you to be the SME, the best at what you do, after all, that’s why they are with you. What are you doing to maintain the trust you have built up with your client? What are you doing to continually preserve your relationship to maintain your client as your client? Advise them when things are going good and also when issues arise, don’t let them find out about things second hand. There is nothing more disappointing … for you.

The loop is the loop

I’ve said it before, “Only you can manage your clients expectations.” Following through and following up on what you said you would do is an important part of your customer relationship build with your client. Keeping your client in the loop is an important part of any client relationship. They have trusted you to get a job done and when it’s moved from their plate to yours, they assume it is well taken care of.

Be contactable

If your business has set hours, make sure you set your boundaries and stick to them. You cannot remain available 16 hours a day, and maintain professionalism and expertise. It’s perfectly okay to NOT be available outside of business hours unless of course your business is advertised as 24/7 then the expectation is easy. Your client needs to be able to contact you and if you can’t answer the phone when it rings, make sure your voicemail is working.

What are you doing to improve your client relationships? I’d love for you to leave a comment below.