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Regardless of your chosen niche or industry, client communication is one of the major factors affecting the survival, growth, and profitability of many agencies worldwide. Unfortunately, if your agency client communication processes are ineffective, your current struggles might not end soon.
Beyond survival, growing an agency is already a tough challenge for many people. Even if you are growing somehow, achieving sustainable growth while maintaining profitability is not easy for everyone. As a testament to this fact, one CallRail study revealed that many people in the industry often struggle with agency client churn rates as high as 40%.
To a large extent, such a high churn rate usually has much to do with how many agency owners and their team members communicate with clients. In a separate study, Amplitude reported that many companies spend seven times more on new customer acquisition instead of keeping existing ones. However, it is well-known that acquiring new clients is far more expensive than retaining them.
In this guide, you'll learn how effective client communication affect client experience and retention rates.
Moreover, you'll discover the best agency-client communication tools to give your client that exceptional experience they crave.
Client communication is the repetitive flow of communication between a service provider and its client. Based on the essential nature of communication itself, how it happens from one context to the other influences varying business outcomes.
Interestingly, the tools you use for agency client communication could be a competitive advantage depending on how you and your team use them.
Perhaps, you might have acknowledged that getting new clients is not the only way to grow your agency. How well are you building strong relationships with effective client communication skills?
Depending on the size of corporate entities involved, client communications could sometimes be a source of challenging complexity.
For example, if there are multiple teams of stakeholders involved before approval, commencement, and execution of a project, it makes the whole process painfully hard in most cases. Imagine having to get permission from multiple client team members before making a minor edit to execute a marketing campaign.
Pause for a while and look at it from the perspective of execution speed and time management.
On the other hand, when fewer team members or individuals are involved, getting the client's perspective and repetitive communication flows faster. Again, the type of agency ``client portal you use could help streamline everything without wasting time on minute details.
In any context, how you communicate with clients often affects the business relationship. However, if you want to enjoy a higher level of mutual respect and brand trust, it is also important to consider a client's team members.
Below are some specific ways client communication preferences and other dynamics affect strong relationships.
Scope creep is a major factor undermining a service provider and client relationship. From the onset, everyone is usually excited to start the project as soon as possible until things begin to go beyond the agreed scope of work.
Most times, scope creeping happens as a result of clients' inability to communicate clear expectations in a timely manner. On the other hand, a lower level of self-awareness could also make some agency owners unable to hold meaningful conversations and communicate all relevant information before signing a client contract.
Moreover, if you are not an active listener and don't commit to practicing self-awareness, you may be in a repetitive cycle of scope creep.
Related Read: How To Manage Client Expectations [Tips For Agency Owners]
Clarifying the scope of work is one thing; how you onboard new agency clients is another area where communication makes a big difference. In most cases, there is a chance that your potential client has worked with other agencies. Based on this fact, they constantly make comparisons starting from the onboarding process.
Interestingly, this is the point you need to start to develop trust by sharing valuable insights on a personal level. Depending on the size of your agency, you should also train employees to practice active listening while trying to keep a client on the same page.
Team collaboration dynamics also affect agency-client relationships. In this case, I am talking about project collaboration between your internal team members and your client's team members. Assuming things are not appropriately streamlined in this context, everyone may experience confusing complexity from time to time.
Getting clear on who is responsible for each specific task and the level of approval is extremely important when it comes to effective client communications.
And that's where using the best client communication software with seamless team access management features comes into play.
With some of these client communication tools, you can respond quickly to client feedback and address miscommunications while building lasting relationships.
How will you communicate progress status with different clients? And how often will you communicate with clients to ensure everyone is on the same page while giving immediate attention to the main project execution processes?
You need to answer these questions if you want to keep your loyal customers for the long term. No one likes being lost along the line or receiving notifications only when paying the bills is time. Starting from the onboarding process, clarity on the performance reporting timeline will always affect the overall agency-client relationship.
In practical terms, effective reporting is a proven way to build mutual respect and remind clients why they should continue paying for your agency's services.
Even when some of your team members upset clients, how you seek feedback and respond quickly is equally important. With a constant flow of insightful feedback, you'll be able to improve communication and the results your agency team is delivering to different clients.
Using some of the best agency-client portal software, you can actively leverage the feedback form features to seek valuable insights. You can use automation to get frequent feedback instead of relying on a single conversation.
Related Read: Tips To Deal With Difficult Clients
According to a study conducted by Cogito and published inside Hubspot, around 74% of consumers believe that unhappy employees could have a negative impact on customer experience. Now think about how unhappy employees working for an agency might communicate with clients at work. Try to think about it from the perspective of an agency client and an employee.
In a separate study, Superoffice reported that fast response time is one of the most important aspects of the customer experience.
As you can see from here, responding to clients often happens through communication. But what if your agency employees are not responding fast enough because of work-related fatigue, unhappiness, or other factors?
The key point to note here is that customer experience directly correlates with retention rate.
Hence, only satisfied clients will continue to pay for your services. Unfortunately, when poor communication negatively impacts customer experience, the churn rate tends to be higher. The reverse is also the case when you look at various business contexts.
Besides having a high-value skillset, a trustworthy track record, and trained staff to deliver outstanding results, how your agency communicates will always directly impact clients' confidence.
Perhaps, there is no guesswork around what happens when confidence declines and the client's time is wasted because of poor communication.
These are some reasons why your agency should invest in dedicated client portal software to improve communication in the most appropriate style.
Regardless of the client communication tool you choose, these are the examples most people use to communicate effectively. In addition to getting client feedback, these mediums are used for verbal and nonverbal communication.
Most people keenly interested in building strong client relationships choose face-to-face meetings. The meeting could be held at your client's or agency's office, depending on communication preferences.
The benefits of face-to-face meetings include the following.
Writing is another communication medium thousands of agencies, their employees, and clients use. In this case, a written form of communication happens through email, chat messaging, and even good old letter writing.
By using modern client communication software tools, there won't be any need to travel to meetings.
Depending on who is in charge, modern writing tools can communicate company-wide information while building strong relationships.
Interestingly, there is a wide range of tools you can use for agency client conference calls. When you invest in today's modern communication tools, you might be able to discover some amazing features built for effective business meetings.
Here are some of the benefits of video conferencing you'll get when you invest in the best tools for that.
Good old phone calls still serve thousands for effective agency-client relationship management. With phones, for example, there is never a need to Schedule meetings to get everyone involved simultaneously.
Even when there is bad news to deal with, you can pick up the phone and start dialing the people involved.
Agency Client: I sent an email 4 days ago about the declining quality of leads generated from Facebook Ads. But since then, no one has responded.
Agency Team Member: So sorry about that, I’ll talk to the person in charge of Facebook advertising. We’ll be in touch via email as soon as possible.
Agency Client: Okay thanks, I’ll be looking forward to the solution.
Six days later.
Agency Client: It’s close to two weeks now and no one has responded to my questions or help find a solution to the declining quality of leads generated from Facebook Ads.
Agency Team Member: So sorry about that, the person in charge of Facebook advertising is not on duty this week. I’ll see what I can do about it.
Agency Client: How soon?
Agency Team Member: I can’t be sure for now, but I’ll work on it.
NOTE: As shown in this conversation, improper communication line and neglected handover of duty could undermine a client’s trust. And that could result in cancellation of retainer contracts.
Improved Communication – Though using traditional communication channels for client relationship management is possible, having a dedicated portal offers higher customer satisfaction. Depending on the features of the client portal software you choose, better communication is one of its significant benefits.
As noted earlier, customer experience directly correlates with retention rate. Using agency client portal software lets you give your clients exceptional experiences they have not had with other agencies. In specific terms, the organization of project documents makes it easy for everyone.
When your clients have lots of valuable data stored in an agency portal, it increases the level of loyalty towards your brand. What happens is that these people tend to get used to the dashboard while enjoying high-level customer satisfaction.
Your clients can access the data they need to make business decisions whenever they want. In some cases, round-the-clock access to data without coming to your agency's office might give a client a different competitive advantage.
The best part is that your employees don't have to spend time guiding clients through the reports they need. When your agency staff no longer needs to spend time on manual reporting and data-sharing processes, the time saved could be invested in other revenue-generating activities.
Effective client communication is an important factor affecting sales conversion rate, retention rate, lifetime value, and profitability. As you can see, it has a lot to do with the survival and growth of your agency.
For example, when you are getting multiple inquiries from your marketing efforts, low lead response time could have a negative impact on your sales conversion rate.
Even though how you communicate with clients has worked so well over time, making consistent improvements is in your best interest. Here are some proven ways to improve communication skills at work.
#1: Embrace Active Listening – You will understand what the other party is saying only when actively listening. Active listening is about concentrating beyond the sound of words being communicated. Because some words and statements could have different meanings in different contexts.
Moreover, you should be repeatedly intentional about overcoming your tendency to interrupt
#2: Pay Attention To Body Language – Different messages could be communicated through body language without words. Unless you are paying full attention, there is a possibility you'll continue to miss the messages that come only through body language. Don't forget to make full eye contact when observing body language.
#3: Recheck Your Messages Before Sending – don't just check your message once before sending. Form a habit of checking multiple times before hitting send. Repetitive checks will help you to avoid certain errors that may leave a wrong impression on the recipient of your message.
#4: Practice Self Awareness – Self-awareness will give you psychological balance when communicating with clients or anyone, for that matter. When you are fully aware of the flow of your thoughts, it makes It easier to communicate effectively with anyone. Here are some specific ways to practice and improve self-awareness.
#5: Use The Best Tools For The Jobs – Instead of relying on old tools and outdated communication best practices, using modern tools is a proven way to make consistent improvements. Most times, you might be surprised to discover some great features best suited for your current workflow and the challenges you face when communicating with clients.
Project performance reporting is one of the things that consume a lot of time among agency owners and their team members. It won't give a good impression of your brand if you still rely on manual communication processes and file management systems for such reporting. With Clientjoy client portal software, you can improve the effectiveness of your communication processes and customer experience.
Embeddable Reporting System – Make self-serving access to data easy for your clients. That means you don’t have to spend any minute trying to organize and share data with your agency clients.
Integrated Appointment Scheduler – Schedule client appointments with ease. You can embed the ClientJoy scheduler on your agency website.
Custom Domain Hosting – Host the client portal with a custom domain or subdomain to maintain brand recognition and higher trust.
Customizable Script – Besides the domain, you can use the CSS and custom script to make the client portal interface suit your brand. Enabling an interactive chatbot will help you give your agency clients a better engagement experience they might share with others.
Regardless of the business context, how you communicate with your agency clients usually impacts many variables. Hence, it's not something you should leave to chance.
As I have noted earlier, getting agency clients is one thing. Keeping them for as long as possible is an entirely different challenge.
Besides having the technical competence and trained employees to deliver your services, what your clients experience through constant communication influences the decision to continue or stop retaining your services.
At this point, it's worth noting that knowledge acquisition is not the same as process improvement. Beyond knowledge acquisition, you can explore how modern communication tools can help achieve better business results by signing up for a free trial.
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