Solidify Your Client Relationships - Let Your Clients Have a Peek Behind the Curtain

Now more than ever professional services firms need to find a way to solidify their relationships with clients. One of the best ways to do that is make them feel that your team is truly acting as an extension of their company. This makes them understand how much you value their business. Many firms will write reports and make sure clients are getting deliverables and meeting notes in a timely manner. But that is still delivering work product to clients instead of actually letting them in. So how do you do you build a more solid relationship with your clients?

One of the best ways to let your clients in is to truly operate transparently. I don’t mean that you necessarily work onsite all the time or send daily updates (that can be expensive and cumbersome). But you can use collaboration tools to manage your own work on behalf of clients and then provide them with unfettered access. Giving your clients the ability to see what you are doing when you do it will certainly make them feel better about the work that they are paying for and will go a long way towards building trust. It will also help you manage their expectations better and eliminate any doubt about your workload, especially if you operate on a time-and-materials basis. If all your work products are delivered to clients via email over time, they never have the opportunity to truly appreciate the effort that goes into their project as they never get to see all the work in one place.

There are tons of inexpensive tools out there to help even the smallest firm or sole practitioner collaborate with clients. Any collaboration tool that you consider should have a few basic features. They include: the ability to upload multiple documents simultaneously; full text searching across all documents loaded in the library; the ability to integrate calendars and similar tools with MS Outlook, or whatever scheduling application that you use; storing links to key project assets can be useful; managing tasks, including the assignment of tasks to project team members and tracking progress against assignments; plus the ability to post messages or announcements to keep all stakeholders informed of key events and happenings.

This approach will provide clients with complete transparency into your activities on their behalf. If you think about it, they are paying for your time; they might as well know how their money is being spent.

Once you pull back the curtain and show your clients all aspects of your activities, you may find that your own tracking tools are lacking. Naturally, there are all kinds of project tools that you can use, and I won’t get into the best ones here, but it is important to make sure that you are consistent in how you manage your tasks. I have found that the old maxim “A picture is worth a thousand words” is truly correct. As such, I always try to include a graphical representation of our activities instead of just coughing up spreadsheets or pages and pages of prose explaining activities. Clients seem to appreciate the effort made to help them visualize the final solution and nothing keeps us on the same page better than something that I can point to later if some confusion arises.

When things are difficult for your clients you need to make yourself invaluable. The best way to do that is to help them understand how much you already do for them. This will make it easier for them to appreciate your current and past work and will hopefully prevent you from being cut from their budget as they look for creative ways to reduce costs.