Your clients are the lifeblood of your organisation; therefore, your success in engaging them could hamper, for better or worse, the success of the company itself. However, your drive to ensure this could be threatened by various factors of which you have failed to take sufficient account.
This would be understandable; after all, it can be too easy to overlook exactly what those factors are. Here are some tips for preventing your connections with your clients falling by the wayside.
Don’t let technology replace face-to-face engagement
Advances in technology have undoubtedly fuelled greater convenience and functionality for various businesses; you might even be able to run many aspects of your company just from your phone. However, workplace strategist Erica Keswin warns, in a Forbes article, of the need to strike a balance between online and offline routines.
Hence, don’t allow email and phone conversations to supplant face-to-face ones, for which you could also take out public liability insurance. Finding the right policy for this type of insurance can be easier if you use a public liability insurance comparison site.
Nonetheless, make clever use of social media
Still, meeting up with your clients in person might not always be practical or even possible; insisting on offline exchanges on every occasion could risk you losing a valuable client.
Indeed, technology can still serve worthwhile purposes for client engagement. Sharing unique and creative material on social media can particularly pay off, advises Small Business Trends. You can also automate particular parts of your social media strategy to free up time to spend on other matters.
Set a good example for the rest of your organisation
The subject of client engagement is not one that only your sales and marketing personnel need to be concerned with. In fact, employees at every level of the organisation can engage with clients; therefore, they should make sure they know how to do it well, as Customer Think implies.
Even the CEO would not be exempt from this. They can particularly help the rest of the company by modelling how client engagement ought to be handled by every other employee at the firm.
Keep the internal communication systems strong
If there are any cracks or breaks in those systems, don’t simply trust that evidence of those compromises won’t leak out to your clients. Indeed, you might even have staff who are responsible for keeping clients informed about any issues that have recently emerged.
However, various department of your company should have strong and reliable communication links with other departments; otherwise, there could be an inadvertent impact on end users.
Seek your employees’ feedback on your products or services
If your company sells sophisticated products the manufacture of which requires very particular and specialised techniques and materials, you might usually think of leaving the testing of those products to the people who actually make them. However, this could be a surprisingly big mistake…
Remember that your company could have other employees who would be target clients for products like yours. Therefore, don’t be afraid to let those people try out the products during the testing stage. They could provide insights that are unexpectedly useful for you.
Give your workers worthwhile productivity tools
How can you improve how employees fare in their jobs? Simple: by giving them better resources. To that end, you could invest in productivity tools that can lead these employees to more clearly understand client issues. They could show empathy and so boost the company-client connection.
Worthwhile productivity tools do not have to be expensive; fidget spinners, for example, can help relieve anguish in many members of your workforce.