Last week I wrote about the social aspects of client care: those little things you do that make you easier to work with so that current clients remain clients.
This week the topic is customer service aspects of client care. Why? Because the best business relationship skills on the planet can’t compensate for poor quality work or poor customer service skills. You’ll be a very friendly freelancer with no work if you don’t master the other side of client care skills. To keep clients coming back for more, here are some business management skills you need to develop:
Don’t just “do the job.” Take care of your clients. Here’s a truth you would do well to recognize: many freelancers out there can do the work you’re doing just as well as you do. Some can do it better, and some can do it for a lot less money. If you hope to compete with them and build your business, you have to provide that extra something that keeps your clients coming back to you even when they know someone else can do the work for less money. What is that “extra something?” It’s care and attention.
Your clients hire you to do a job, it’s true. But many people could do the job. When you take care of your clients by giving them extra attention, you become indispensable. For example, a client recently hired me to write the speaker notes for a sales presentation she was scheduled to give at a conference. She sent me all the relevant emails, and in one of them, I discovered a request from the conference organizers for a speaker’s biography to go with the presentation. I wrote the biography based on other information I knew about the speaker, and sent it to my client with a note that said, “Just thought I’d move forward on this in case you weren’t aware of it. It’s due next week.” She had not known about it, and my extra effort to take care of her not only landed me more work, but also cemented her loyalty to me.
Be well organized. For example, you should be able to find anything related to clients and their work at any time. You need to keep good records. Not just of work performed and payments received, but of every interaction with clients. Clients will ask you something like this: “What was it we talked about over email just before the holiday?” It would probably be no big deal if you said, “Geez, that was so long ago I don’t remember,” but how impressive would it be if you could produce the emails or notes from the phone call? Organization affects all aspects of your business, from efficiency to costs and retaining clients.
Respond to clients quickly. One downside of email, instant messaging, cell phones, and text messages is that people increasingly expect responses right now. I’ve been frustrated many times by people who are slow to respond to emails, and if you frustrate clients, they’ll simply find someone else to do the job. I suggest that you try to reply within two hours, unless you have a lot of email. You have to be careful with this one, though, because if you get a lot of communication from clients, responding immediately could really impede your ability to work efficiently. Here are a couple of guidelines to help you both respond quickly and work efficiently:
- Read email at designated times. Email is a tyrant that can quickly take charge of your day. Take charge of it by designating slots of time during which you will read and respond to email.
- Consider using auto reply. Set your email up to send a message back to the writer. It could say something like this: “Your email is important to me and I will reply no later than end of day today.” That defuses the client’s anxiety about when you will write back and allows you to continue your work.
These are just a few suggestions. You’ll discover other important ways to take care of your clients, and you probably already have others. Share them in the comments.
Steve 
Joe 
