Digitalks #09. Maintaining Strong Client Relationships
We have the ultimate guide to maintaining a strong relationship with clients directly from a Senior Account Manager with years of experience
Digitalks is a virtual brown bag lunch meeting by Breadnbeyond’s Digital Marketing team where all valuable information, feedback, ideas, seminars, and training sessions are shared.
Maintaining a good relationship with a client is like walking on a slippery road.
Once you take the wrong step, everything can be over in a blink of an eye.
It gets more challenging because clients differ in personalities and attitudes. So handling them with a single approach can go completely wrong.
So, shall we agree that maintaining a strong relationship with a client is a tricky job?
To give you more insight about this topic, an Account Manager from Breadnbeyond, Kiky, shared a story of handling different types of clients.
What Does It Mean to be an Account Manager?
- Greeting clients after the introduction from sales
- Discussing the project
- Sending updates about the project and responding to client’s revision
- Making sure the final product meet client’s expectations
- Making sure clients are happy before-during-after the project
How to Maintain a Good Relationship with Clients
Being an account manager means that you have to deal with clients with different stories, backgrounds, and attitudes for years.
Good customer service
- Respond quickly (be there when clients need to talk)
- Understand clients need
- Be a problem solver
Good quality of products
- The overall products meet their expectation
- High-quality final products
Distinguishing Clients: Good and “Difficult” Clients
Good clients will respond well and actively share feedback within the scope of work.
They also approve revisions on time, so the projects run within the schedule.
Good clients are also helpful whenever the company needs further information or clarification.
Meanwhile, “difficult” clients are the opposite.
“Difficult clients” refers to those clients that are hardly approachable and sometimes make you raise eyebrows.
They tend to respond slower, ask for too many revisions, give unclear comments, and ask to speed up the process while they’re the ones slowing it down.
Both good and difficult client needs a different approach when it comes to customer service.
How to Maintain Relationships with Good Clients
Just because your clients are good to handle, you can’t let your guard down.
Check out some tips to keep a good relationship with clients.
Keep up the momentum
- Reply to email in less than 24 hours
- Follow up and give updates regularly
- Make sure not to miss anything
- Make sure to stay within the timeline
- Double-check that the final product meets the client’s criteria
Bring positive attitudes
- Don’t let personal problems affect your relationship with clients
- Approach clients with personalized warm welcome responses
- Give sincere caring
- Be problem solver
- Offer them to have a meeting if they are confused to share feedback
Provide extra services
- Give bonus products
- Give upgraded quality of a product
- Giving options when they’re not sure which products to choose
- Offer help from the creative director
- Give an ‘Ok’ if they ask for a meeting
How to Maintain Relationships with “Difficult” Clients
There’s no such dead-end to anything, including handling “difficult” clients.
They present unique customer service challenges and require specific training and techniques to satisfy their needs.
Here are some secrets to winning their hearts.
Try understanding their struggle
- Keep calm and listen to their rant or complain first
- Apologize if the product doesn’t meet their expectations
- Offer solutions
- Make sure to understand what they want
- Talk with empathy
Maintain your professionality (do what should be done)
- Send them updates
- Double-check the works or revisions
- Reply messages immediately
- Make sure the final product meets their expectation
- Show gratitude and say thank you regardless of what has happened throughout the project
Not knowing how to deal with such difficult situations will invariably lead to the clients leaving and taking their contracts with them.
So, just because your clients are hardly approachable doesn’t mean you can’t win them and maintain good relationships.
After all, good customer service or support that every account manager provides means that they have to keep themselves in top shape and ready to effectively handle all kinds of clients.
More Digitalks:
Breadnbeyond helps you to create high-converting animated explainer videos.
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