Managing clients well is key to a successful business.
When you manage your clients effectively, they're happy, your business' reputation grows, and customers keep returning. It improves customer satisfaction, increasing your retention rate. This helps you keep earning revenue from existing businesses for a longer time.
In this article, we'll cover important skills that help you build strong relationships with your clients. These skills will be crucial to ensuring that you and the people you interact with have a great experience, especially in a client-facing role.
1. Communicate proactively
Proactive communication in a client-facing role establishes trust and transparency with the client. It helps strengthen the relationship and encourages shared ownership. Clients start trusting and conversing openly with you, where they can share their needs and bring up any concerns. It helps you provide a good customer experience, improving your retention rates.
Nurture customer relationships to expand business revenue. Clear and consistent communication is the key. If you converse a lot on WhatsApp, Cooby will help you stay on top of every crucial interaction for your business.
It makes you more productive and focused while clearing out administrative work. Cooby’s WhatsApp solution automatically syncs chats with HubSpot. You can easily see all interactions with users in your CRM, and converse contextually on WhatsApp.
2. Keep customer interactions organized
Organizing conversations with customers helps you prioritize better. It gives you focus while you’re lost in numerous clients’ chats popping up in your inbox. It gets tricky to manage them, especially on WhatsApp which doesn’t offer a focused inbox.
With Cooby, you get an inbox to organize chats in different tabs. This way, you can easily move priority customer chats into one tab and address them immediately. It gives you more focus on dealing with customer issues and resolving them promptly to offer support. You have the functionality to close a chat or snooze them, helping you clear chat as they come and hit Inbox Zero.
Better organization and prioritization of things lets you focus on the critical things of good client relationship management.
3. Ability to negotiate
The ability to negotiate is valuable in any workplace. Communicating clearly and working toward an agreeable solution is the stepping stone to practical negotiation skills. It’s essential to articulate your thoughts and feelings, and listening to others actively plays a vital role in negotiation.
Another important aspect that you must consider as an essential negotiation skill is planning. You want to be able to plan clearly to ensure that you do not overlook the important elements needed to achieve your goals.
“Enhancing your negotiation skills has an enormous payoff. It allows you to reach agreements that might otherwise slip through your fingers. It allows you to expand the pie - create value - so you get more benefits from the agreements that you do reach. In some cases, it also allows you to resolve small differences before they escalate into big conflicts.”
- Michael Wheeler, A professor at Harvard Business School
4. Hone virtual meeting etiquette
Virtual meetings may look different, but the standard guidelines remain the same as those for traditional in-person meetings.
This helps lighten the mood and allows everybody to settle in before getting to work. Try joining on time, especially if you have scheduled it with a client. Making a client wait without prior intimation may not work well in your favor.
Below are a few helpful tips to make you look professional when meeting a client remotely.
- Check your audio and video before the meeting, and ensure it’s working fine.
- Prepare for the meeting and make notes of things you’ll talk about.
- Inform the team about the agenda to ensure everybody is on the same page.
- If you’re going to discuss an idea, create a one-pager to document it properly. This helps your clients see you’re serious and aren’t talking randomly.
5. Improve emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence (EI) elevates interpersonal skills to a whole new level. It helps you understand and manage your emotions and decodes your clients' unspoken feelings.
Kevin Guest, Executive Chairman at USANA Health Sciences underlines the importance of EI. He says, “As we communicate effectively with a strong sense of empathy, accountability, and flexibility, we'll find that we handle stress better and act with a greater perspective, which benefits everyone."
This is true when managing client relationships. Emotional intelligence gives you empathy and helps you develop a service mindset. You start going one step deeper in providing support, helping you provide a memorable customer experience.
6. Become better at solving problems
In client relationship management, adept problem-solving enables professionals to address client concerns and deliver exceptional service. By actively and passively listening to clients' needs and finding solutions using unique techniques, you can foster trust and loyalty, ultimately strengthening long-term partnerships.
As a procurement coordinator, Luana Rodriques aptly states, “Problem-solving is all about logic and imagination. You should use both when approaching a problem. Anticipate potential future problems and act accordingly.”
7. Develop business acumen and industry knowledge
Deepening your understanding of business and industry knowledge is vital for nurturing strong client relationships. Most clients prefer working with professionals who demonstrate a strong grasp of their industry and can offer valuable insights. Hence, it becomes equally important to stay updated with all the developments and updates in your particular domain in the market.
You build trust and credibility when you truly understand your client's industry and can speak their language.
Dan Lok, a venture capitalist and industry leader, rightly points out that business acumen should not be confined to one position in the company. “It doesn’t matter what position you hold in a company; understanding basic business acumen directly affects how well you perform. When you think about it, you will realize that everyone in the company is a part of the revenue-generating process.”
8. Learn to collaborate cross-functionally
Clients look for support people who can help them address their business needs. However, as a sales or customer success professional, you might not always have the resources or expertise to deliver a perfect solution for your clients.
In such situations, cross-functional collaboration skills will help you immensely to work with others in the company to solve clients’ needs. When you work with other teams to stretch your scope to help clients, they feel valued. It nourishes your relationship with them, and keeps you on their minds whenever they’re in need.
Did you know? Cooby offers a helpful way for the team to collaborate on WhatsApp conversations. Whenever a client reaches out to you on WhatsApp, you don’t have to be a bridge to transport communications. You can easily collaborate with you team on the WhatsApp conversations and deliver support efficently.
Keep your focus steady
WhatsApp conversations can quickly become chaotic if they’re not managed properly. If you’re not using WhatsApp for work, it might not affect you that much. However, when you’re dealing with your clients on WhatsApp in any capacity, you need a focused inbox with capabilities that reduce your manual work.
Cooby offers a wide range of benefits. It lets you easily integrate WhatsApp with HubSpot or Salesforce CRM, keeping all your conversations in one place. You can also send messages without saving a number, add a reminder, take notes, and do so much more on WhatsApp.
Take a free trial of Cooby and unlock maximum productivity on WhatsApp.
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