Client Relationship Management

Recently I attended a training that helped me to understand the term “Relationship” . I am sure we have been facing hard times in handling clients in our professional domain.

“Relationship” is not only required in our personal life, but also is very important in terms of making a business successful. Creating a relationship with clients makes your business run smoother. They expect the work to be done with quality, accuracy, on time and lots of other parameters. Including all these there is also the “TRUST” factor that runs the business between us and the clients. We should maintain the trust for long-term partnership in business.

There may be thousand other factors on contract and SLA's defined but Client Relationship also stands on Trust "FBF"...

What is FGF? Feel good factor.... This makes client remember you.

Feel good factor is a human behaviour, mostly as a feeling when you interact with others.

Anytime a client comes into contact with any aspect of requirement for business, however remote, there is an opportunity to form an impression which creates FGF. Utilising the opportunity and using the chance as ladder can together create FGF and trust.

To make this bond going, there are MOT's - Moment of truths....

For Clients to remember you: Identify those MOTs and turn them into FGF for clients and exceed their expectations only when highly required for client,

All clients are not equal. Some clients value relationships and personal interactions, some value efficiency, cost and time savings. Others value comfort and avoiding pain at all costs. The sooner you can discover what a client values, the better you can deliver it and build loyalty.

There can be times when your trust and FGF will be on critical stage. Normally we go through struggles to get over it. It feels like you are in Border of a war to save your country. Those situations should be overcomed with a level of resistance.

There are situation where client can be insecure with the trust, there might be replies ..... “I don’t get it “ .  To those replies, understand and empathise their confusions and try to put the feelings that you are aware of the insecurity they fell.

I don’t get it can also turn into I don’t like it.... That shows the sense of emotionality in clients. Identify the cause of emotional reaction, state of fear, and empathise the fear as required.

At times you have to ask open ended questions and to share the truth. Admitting the mistakes where client says “I don’t like you or I don’t like the way you work”. It describes the highest level of insecurity. Enrich your ideas with their ideas, give more importance to their ideas, extend support of team and make your clients believe in you again.

Overcome the levels of resistance to make the FGF more effective.