The success of your business is directly proportional to your client’s satisfaction with respect to your products and services. Moreover, your clients’ satisfaction is also directly proportional to the extent of trust and rapport that you build with your clients. Effective communication with the client can be considered the foundation of the trust and rapport that need to be established with the clients. However, there are some common mistakes that can degrade the quality of the communication that you are having with the clients. By the end of this blog post, you will be aware of those common mistakes, and you will learn how to avoid them.
| Do’s | Don’ts |
| Always try to give concrete timelines | Avoid the words that convey vague timelines |
| Streamline the information that is being conveyed. | Avoid giving too much of information |
| Always keep the client updated | Don’t wait for the client to take follow-up in case of delay in deliverables |
| Modify the standard communication templates as per the situation and client | Don’t forget to keep a personal touch in communication |
Now that you have got the basic idea of certain do’s and don’ts, let’s analyze them in detail.
Not giving concrete timelines
“We will get it done as soon as possible.”
“We will get back to you soon.”
“This will take a while.”
Above are some phrases that are used by so many people in today’s corporate world. However, no matter how abundantly they are used, it is still the WRONG approach of communicating with the client. Whether you are giving the timeline for any deliverables or fixing any issue raised by the client, it is important to note that we should always give a specific timeline to the client. It is one of the best practices in client communication and it establishes a lot of trust and understanding with the client. Some examples of giving concrete timelines are mentioned below:
“We will get it done by Wednesday”
“We will get back to you by next week”
“This will take 1 week. Thanks for your patience.”
Not being specific/Giving too much information
Communication is all about the transfer of information between the source and the receiver. So, it becomes crucial to maintain clarity in this transfer of information. It is imperative to have a clear idea of what you want to communicate with the client. Occasionally, while communicating with the client, we give too much information because of which the clarity is lost somewhere. So, it’s not a good idea to include too much information at once in any form of communication. Always, set the main theme initially and follow it throughout the communication. In this way, the communication will be streamlined, and it will be easy for the client to process it.
Zero communication at the time of delay
Due to so many reasons, there can be some delay in the deliverables to the client and it is completely acceptable as well. However, it is not at all acceptable to keep the client uninformed about these delays. Whenever there is some delay in the deliverables, we should keep the client posted about the current update instead of just waiting for the client to take the follow-up after the delay. Doing this will decrease the chances of escalation because of delay. Having constant communication with the client and sending regular updates at the time of delay will help you to maintain trust with the client.
Not being personal
This might sound surprising as we are always told to be professional with the clients. However, we can have a personal touch in client communication without the risk of being unprofessional. Most of the business nowadays have some standard communication templates when it comes to communicating with the clients in various situations. This is in fact a good thing to do but there need to be some modifications in those templates based on the client and the situation. This will help you to keep the personal touch intact in professional communication with the client.
So, it can be concluded that if the clients’ trust and rapport are inside a lock that is not easy to break, then effective client communication is the simple key to that lock. We just have to make sure that the keys must not be rusted by some common mistakes discussed above.