The other day, I saw a post on Twitter from a business owner who was frustrated and upset because a client emailed him at 4:30 in the afternoon one day and then left a voicemail message early the next morning seeking a response. The owner was feeling frustrated that he wasn’t given any time to respond. He felt like he was really being pushed. He was wondering if he was right to be annoyed.
You have to set expectations for your customers early and often. When you get a new client there’s real value in learning about them. Try to discover how they need to receive information. We are aware of what’s going on so we assume everyone is in the know. However, silence to a customer equals no activity, no progress. There are a couple of things that we can do to help ourselves and help our clients.
The first one is to set up a communication structure so that it is part of the policy and process for communicating progress or lack of it, as well as what we’re doing about it. This should be consistent and worked into the implementation plan.
While they are welcome to reach out at any time that doesn’t mean we will be responding at any time. Let them know when they can expect to hear back from you. They’re going to reach out when they have a question, when they have information, or when something changes. That could be any time of the day, night, or weekend. Ensure they understand your response policy.
For example, we could have an auto responder on our email that lets them know we received their email and will be responding within x timeframe.
The key is to follow through. If you say you are going to respond within a certain timeframe you must do that. You never want a customer to feel like they have to hunt you down to gain information. It creates mistrust and signals that you might not be giving them the level of service, quality, or care they expect.
Take a look inward and ask, have you set expectations early and often? Are you reminding your customers of those expectations when it’s necessary to do so? Are you being responsive and communicative? Are you ahead of the game in situations where you should be? It’s important that the relationship you have with your customer is one where there’s an understanding of how things are going to go and then make sure things go that way.
You don’t want your customers leaving because they feel like you’re not being responsive or attentive when there’s an easy way to just implement a process that guarantees you are going to keep them posted and respond to them effectively.
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