Client communication is one of the vital necessary ways to grow your service-based business.
That’s because good client communication leads to happier clients.
And happier clients means more referrals and a thriving business.
In one report from Harvard, client satisfaction rose 17% when client communication improved.
So what are some ways you’ll be able to improve your client communications so as to grow what you are promoting?
In this text, we’ll spell all of it out including what exactly we mean after we say “client communication,” why it’s critical to your success, and the way to improve your client communication with just a number of small changes.
We’ll also share helpful tools that may enable you improve your client communication without spending every minute of your work days in client meetings.
What’s Client Communication?
Let’s start off by getting on the identical page when it comes to client communication. What exactly will we mean after we discuss communication with clients?
Client Communication includes any interaction you may have together with your clients or customers, including current, previous, or future clients.
You may communicate with clients in-person, over text or email, during a video call, and even asynchronously using tools like ZipMessage.
Effective client communication might be formal—equivalent to on an official call or informal—equivalent to through a fast text message. It will possibly be intentional or unintentional.
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Client communication is occurring in any respect times—whether you plan it or not. In truth, the act of NOT communicating with a client is, in its own way, a type of client communication (albeit, a poor one).
Why You Should Give attention to Improving Client Communication
If you happen to provide a service on your clients, you’ll want to give attention to effective client communication otherwise you’ll have trouble growing what you are promoting.
We recommend you begin by reading (*8*)these 9 Client Communication Best Practices You Must Use.
Ignoring or just being unaware of client communication best practices is solely unacceptable.
That’s because corporations who give attention to client communication skills:
- Get more repeat work from their current clients
- Stay retained for longer projects with their current clients
and - Get more referrals from satisfied clients
Let’s look into each of those advantages below.
Get more repeat work out of your clients
If you’re a great communicator and deliver quality work on your clients, you’ll get more repeat work from those clients.
While most freelancers and agencies realize it’s much easier to retain a client than to discover a recent one, we frequently forget the identical is true for our clients.
No client wants to start your complete process all over again: vetting applicants, getting their boss on-board, notifying HR, signing more paperwork. It’s lots.
As an alternative, should you give attention to quality client communication and quality work, your clients will keep coming back to you over and all over again since you’ve built a solid relationship with them.
For more ideas, we recommend you read 7 Suggestions for Constructing Client Relationships (At Scale).
If you happen to can master this process, you simply need 5-8 quality clients with repeat work so as to construct an excellent, sustainable business.
Stay retained for longer client projects
In fact, even higher than repeat work is getting retained by your best clients for long-term projects.
This may help generate monthly revenue you’ll be able to depend on to grow from freelancer to agency and beyond.
But no client goes to want to work long-term with someone that doesn’t communicate well. In truth, one study revealed a whopping 86% of staff blame ineffective communication because the predominant cause for workplace failures.
You may’t afford to be the reason behind failure on your client.
Get more client referrals
Word-of-mouth marketing is keeping many freelancers, agencies, and other service providers in business.
In truth, one Harvard study revealed that 84% of freelancers who make greater than $100,000 per 12 months receive most of their clients from “word of mouth” marketing.
And that’s not true just for freelancers. 64% of marketers agree that word-of-mouth is probably the most effective form of selling and 92% of clients trust referrals from people they know.
If getting referrals is essential to your service-based business (and it obviously must be) then improving your client communication skills must be at the highest of your list.
How to Improve Your Client Communication Skills
Now that we’ve outlined exactly why you must give attention to more efficient client communication, let’s unpack exactly how you’ll be able to do it.
We’ll do this by outlining two necessary pieces:
- Client Communication Best Practices
and - Client Communication Tools
We’ll start with a number of best practices and we’ll include a number of great client communication tools you’ll be able to leverage.
Client Communication Best Practices
The excellent news about improving your communication with clients is you don’t have to start from scratch.
Researchers, in addition to other service providers have been communicating with clients for many years and plenty of of them have shared their best practices and findings with the remaining of us.
Listed below are 8 Best Practices for Communicating with Clients:
1. Start Early with Effective Client Communication
You may set your clients’ expectations early on by over-communicating from the start. It’s never too early to determine what your client expects when it comes to communication.
Listed below are a few ideas to implement early on in the method:
- Connect your clients together with your communication tool of selection (we highly recommend you are trying ZipMessage) from the start of your relationship.
- Be upfront and open about how and when your client would love communications.
While it’s necessary to draw boundaries together with your client, use the early stages of your relationship to over-communicate and be as available as possible until you’ve built up a robust and healthy relationship.
2. Over-communicate (your clients won’t feel like you’re)
Even busy clients appreciate frequent, quick updates on the work they’re paying you to complete.
You may provide timely updates at regular intervals by letting your clients know that you just are hard at work on their projects, and that you just are on course to reach the following milestone or deadline as discussed.
Experts recommend sending at the least one formal update each week—but you should use ZipMessage to asynchronously send necessary updates anytime. What’s higher, your client can view your message on their very own schedule and reply when it’s convenient.
If you’re working with recent clients, expect them to worry greater than crucial. To abate growing concern, promise to keep them updated in the long run and ensure to allow them to know immediately about any issues or delays you encounter as well.
During a project, send clients frequent messages summarizing what you discussed and supplying priceless information in regards to the next phase of your project.
3. Maintain Transparency with Your Clients
Transparency is the important thing to maintaining good client communication practices and constructing trust between yourself and your clients.
It’s best to remain honest and transparent at every step of the projects you’re employed on, from providing pricing guides to supplying your clients with working timelines and delivery dates.
Be honest about potential delays and communicate directly together with your client whenever you need additional time or resources to complete a job.
There just isn’t a single problem you’ll be able to encounter that can get BETTER by keeping it out of your client. Eventually, the reality will come out and it should be worse should you failed to communicate together with your client along the way in which.
4. Give attention to Convenience for Your Client
There’s nothing more frustrating as a client than hiring someone to get a job done, only to receive phone calls and emails multiple times a day asking for assist in getting the job done.
As an alternative, give attention to making your client communication extremely convenient. Listed below are a number of ways to do this:
- Use asynchronous software like ZipMessage so your clients can view and respond to your messages at their convenience.
- Batch your requests and send them abruptly as a substitute of sending messages multiple times every day.
- Be a problem-solver and take initiative to overcome challenges you encounter during your client projects as a substitute of immediately asking for his or her help.
5. Don’t Get Too Technical
Your client doesn’t need to know the ins-and-outs of each detail of your project together. They hired you to handle the project and find an answer.
So when communicating together with your clients, avoid highly technical or in-depth industry jargon unless requested.
Use clear, skilled language and welcome any clarifying questions they could have.
6. Show Your Human Side
There are only a few clients preferring cold, robotic communication. In fact, you wish to remain skilled in any respect times when communicating with clients, but work to make sure that they feel comfortable interacting with you.
Establish a respectful human reference to them and also you will probably be higher able to forge and maintain a mutually helpful working relationship.
7. Use the Right Client Communication Tools
Some communication channels are higher suited to specific situations than others. You will want to consider how best to deliver news and updates to your clients.
Some popular tools for client communication include video conferencing, email, easy messaging, phone calls, video messages, text messages, personal letters or a fax (yes, some clients still communicate over fax).
The trick to selecting the proper client communication tool normally lies in your client’s individual preferences and your individual skilled workflow.
Some clients might prefer a fast update in the shape of a WhatsApp message, while others would appreciate a more skilled medium equivalent to email.
If you happen to aren’t sure which communication tools your clients could be most comfortable with, don’t hesitate to ask them when and the way they would love you to communicate.
We also suggest using a tool like ZipMessage to benefit from multiple mediums. With ZipMessage you’ll be able to send a fast video, type text like an email, attach files, send audio, and lots more. We recommend you have a look here.
For more information on client communication tools, including ZipMessage, scroll to the underside of this text.
8. Manage Client Communication Expectations
Many communication frustrations come because your client doesn’t know what to expect.
Imagine the way you’d feel should you expected a weekly update and as a substitute received an update daily. You’d be overwhelmed.
Or perhaps you expect a each day check-in and receive an update every two-weeks. Again, frustrating.
To avoid this type of thing, sit down with each of your clients and ask them how often they’d like updates and progress reports, which times of day suit them best, and the popular methods of communication, as mentioned above.
It’s possible you’ll need to step out of your comfort zone to meet their needs at first. Over time, as they start to trust you more, you’ll be able to start to set more boundaries for communicating together with your clients.
The Best Tools to Improve Client Communication
Improving your client communication will take time. But your efforts might be compounded by finding the proper tools for the job.
While there are a lot of client communication tools on the market, we’d like to highlight three that may really make a difference when communicating with clients.
1. ZipMessage
If you happen to’ve been being attentive during this text, you won’t be surprised in any respect that we highly recommend you employ ZipMessage for communicating with clients.
That’s because ZipMessage has done an excellent job making it possible to communicate often and effectively with clients—without bogging down your calendar with meetings. Plus, there’s a free plan you’ll be able to check out for so long as you would like.
Zoom fatigue is real, causing increasingly more of us to dread client video calls.
But video is so effective. It’s often much easier to communicate something by sharing your screen than by typing all of it out.
That’s what makes ZipMessage so great.
It has all the advantages of a real-time video call, without the trouble. You simply send a video, text, or audio message to your client they usually respond after they are ready—kinda like email but way higher.
It allows you to give your clients the time and energy they deserve, without having to replenish either of your calendars.
Click here to see how ZipMessage could make you a greater communicator.
2. Slack
If you happen to’ve worked online for long, you’ve probably been invited to join someone’s Slack channel. Or perhaps you’ve even set one up for yourself.
Slack is the easy messaging equivalent to email. You may message your clients anytime they usually can respond the identical way.
The issue is your client could have to enroll for Slack and find out how to use it. It’s not nearly as quick-to-use or intuitive as something like ZipMessage (mentioned above) and you may have to upgrade to use features like screen-recording.
As a bonus, it’s also possible to easily integrate your ZipMessage and Slack accounts.
Click here to see why Slack can speed up your communication.
3. ContentSnare
If you happen to end up continuously asking for assets or feedback from clients, chances are you’ll want to consider taking a take a look at ContentSnare. It makes a speciality of gathering information and assets from clients in an organized way.
It’s not an all-in-one communication tool, however it does an excellent job at helping you wrangle those hard-to-get assets from clients who drag their feet.
Click here to see how easily you’ll be able to collect assets with ContentSnare.
What’s next?
And that’s it. A few of our very best advice and resources for becoming a greater client communicator.
So as to benefit from what you’ve read today, listed below are some next steps:
- Make an inventory of client communication best practices (from above) that you just’ll work on in your individual business. Prioritize the list, research, and move forward.
- Enroll for ZipMessage or one other client communication tool of your selection. You’ll notice an enormous positive impact in your communication with clients almost immediately.
- Never stop improving. You won’t get it right immediately. But clients can tell whenever you’re trying to be a great communicator. It’s the hassle that counts and, over time, you’ll get really great at it.
Remember, client communication is as necessary as your billable work, your individual marketing efforts, or the rest you do throughout the day.
Don’t neglect it and also you’ll see it paying off in spades.
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