Best Ways to Improve Relationships with Your Clients

David Webb

May 14, 2018

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Relationships play a vital role in the business world. Whether you’re building relationships with your customers, B2B acquaintances or clients, there's always a mutual benefit. What's more, establishing more personal and long-lasting relationships with clients has become one of the fundamental objectives of every modern business. However, maintaining these relationships isn't quite as easy as everyone believes it to be. It takes a long time to form trust and establish a bond, but it only takes a second for everything to get ruined.

This is especially true since a lot of information is made public nowadays. One simple misstep can lead to really bad publicity, and a single negative comment on social media can ruin someone's reputation and cause major distrust. That's why it's important for businesses to make an extra effort to improve their relationships with customers and clients, as well as to nurture good relations for the sake of both sides. Here are a few of the best ways to improve relationships with clients.

Always communicate

Effective lines of communication are crucial in building, maintaining and improving relationships with clients. Making yourself available to clients allows you to sort out any issues or misunderstandings, as soon as they appear. That way, there's no way for problems to pile up and lead to even bigger problems. Furthermore, communicating with your clients allows you to familiarize yourselves with each other over time and build trust one step at the time.

It's important to ensure that your clients can reach you through various channels, such as phone, voice chat or personal meeting, and not just via company email. That way, you show clients that you care about what they have to say and that they can reach you whenever they need to, via their preferred means. This makes you more trustworthy and it creates opportunities to improve client relationships more efficiently.

Be thoughtful

Improving relationships with clients requires a well-planned approach. For businesses that want to retain their clients, it’s important to maintain the relationship even if you’re not currently working on any project for them. A good way to improve relationships is to consider gifts or small tokens of appreciation, such as promotional products. Giving promotional merchandise is a good way to thank your clients for choosing your services.

It’s also a good way to remind your clients about your agency, to make sure they remember you the next time they require similar services. However, it’s important to design a gift so that it delivers your message accordingly. Oftentimes wrong products can ruin a relationship very quickly. That’s why you need to ensure that the promotional items you send out are meaningful and useful to the person who’s receiving it.

Look for feedback

Don’t hesitate to ask clients what are their overall impressions about you. That way, you can actually improve your business operations based on feedback, in order to appeal more to your clients. It might sound like an extra effort, but sometimes you have to take a step further to improve a relationship with a client. Moreover, through feedback, you can also improve your customer service, which can open new doors for your business.

As a matter of fact, 70% of companies that are famous for their customer service, leverage customer feedback in order to improve their efforts. In addition, 55% of consumers are willing to pay extra for guaranteed good customer service. That being said, it's a good idea to leverage client feedback, so that you can improve your customer service and ensure client satisfaction.

Do the job right

At the end of the day, there's no better way to improve relationships with clients than to deliver the work as promised. The better you do your job, the happier your clients will be. Satisfied clients are more likely to hire you again and they are more willing to have good relations with you. Moreover, satisfied clients will most likely include you in referrals to other companies and further endorse your agency via word-of-mouth recommendations.

That way, you'll not only have a good relationship with your clients, but you'll also have more work coming your way. When an important client refers you to their acquaintances, it means that they are not only satisfied with your work, but that they also trust you enough to recommend you to others. After all, it's their reputation on the line as well, so you have to perform exceptionally.

Relationships have become an important aspect of the business world. Not only do relationships help bring businesses and clients together, but they also encourage a mutually beneficial environment. Without building trust with clients and customers, businesses have little to no hope of ever reaching success.