Why Communicating with Clients Is An Essential Business Skill
July 29, 2008
Roping together those few initial clients when starting up a business is no easy task. As a business grows, though, attracting new clients becomes progressively less difficult. However, staying in touch with clients you already have by regularly communicating is substantially easier than trying to hunt down new ones.
Life requires communication and that definitely applies to the business world as well. If you don’t keep in regular contact with clients, you will not be able to forge the strong, long-term business relationships that are essential to success.
When you are working with a client, it is best to keep communication open, as a way to keep them informed. This is especially true if you haven’t worked together before or if you are working on an extensive project. The client can’t see you and doesn’t know the status of the project unless you let them know what is going on. Keeping them informed of your progress will ease any worries they have.
When any sort of miscommunication comes up, consistently contacting you client will help to clear things up quickly, without allowing the misunderstanding to affect your business in any sort of negative way. For example, what if you and your client confuse a deadline? Suppose you thought it had been set for the 18th, but your client was expecting delivery on the 8th. No doubt your client would be quite upset. Staying in close contact, however, will help you keep such problems from ever arising in the first place.
Emailing clients you’ve worked with in the past can be a good way to find new work. All you have to do is take some initiative and ask how they are and if they would like to avail themselves of your services again. Since your clients are busy people, it is easy for them to forget to get in touch with you. Therefore, it is vital that you work at maintaining communication.
Keeping your name in front of your past clients can also help you achieve positive word of mouth advertising. Word-of-mouth advertising happens when a past or current client is talking to someone in need of the products or services you offer, and they refer you and your business. By staying in touch with your customers, you increase the odds of them remembering your name in upcoming conversations.
You don’t have to call each and every client on the phone as way to communicate, use email as well as newsletters. In fact, newsletters are a great way to promote your new products and services to prior customers. Once someone has bought from you in the past, they are more likely to buy from you in the future.
Creating a monthly newsletter for your customers doesn’t take a lot of time, and it can even be outsourced to a virtual assistant. Your newsletter can be emailed to your clients once per month, and you can use this time to let them know of any new products or services you will be offering, as well as special sales and other items of interest to them.
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