How to Improve Communication with Your Clients

How to Improve Communication with Your Clients

Having strong communications is essential across all different types of business relationships, whether that is with clients, or outsourced services such as freelance services. By improving communication channels, you can be more productive and develop high quality, long-term working relationships. Good communication wins new clients, while poor communication will often result in lost clients and will therefore impact business revenue.

Therefore, it is really important to invest time and effort into improving communications and here are some effective tips for doing this:

Listen, process and analyse the information

One of the important elements of communication that people often overlook is listening and retaining important information. Clients want to know that you understand their requirements and they do not want to waste time repeating information or providing information that you should already know.

It helps to consider yourself to be working for the same business, rather than as an external contractor, then you will show a higher level of engagement with your client’s priorities. You should aim to have goals that are fully aligned to theirs and you also need to spend time to analyse the information and show that both parties understand each other and are both on the same page.

Ask questions

One of the best ways to develop understanding and to demonstrate that you do understand, is to ask lots of questions. It is better to ask lots of questions at the beginning of the working relationship, so you can develop a deeper level of understanding and avoid errors and misunderstandings about the work required. Errors can lead to requiring a lot of revisions and a significant amount of extra work.

Self-awareness

Another important aspect of good communications is having self-awareness of how you convey yourself and the impression that you build. Your role is the expert and what you do and how you deliver your work should demonstrate that you are the expert who is there to provide the solution for your client.

Proactively and realistically set expectations

At the start of any project, you should set realistic expectations out so both parties know what is required and what to expect. This is also the point at which you will outline how work will be requested and delivered, for example, which tools will be used and how you will collaborate.

Reporting progress

On large scale projects, regular progress reports and updates are vital to keep the project moving smoothly. Even if there is not a lot of progress to report one week, a quick update will help to ensure that your client knows where activities are up to and it will save them from chasing for updates.

Choose the right tools

Perhaps the most important factor in communicating effectively with clients is to select the best communication channel. Some people end up jumping around between a range of tools such as Zoom, emails and project management tools.

When you need to efficiently manage change requests, you can do this all on one solution; MaestroCR, which allows you to work with multiple clients on different projects. All parties can see the project status in real-time and easily control cashflow.

Start using MaestroCR today for free.