How to Improve Your Client Relationships

success.com:

• Pre-touch: Your marketing, social media, blog and all set the stage for the customer’s experience and expectations.• First touch: The initial interaction with your product, team or location. “Eighty percent of your client’s permanent impression of you comes from that first touch,” Webb says.• Core experience: “You must be a constant, active observer—always looking for clues where you could potentially miss the mark with your client,” he says, noting that the vast majority of unhappy customer experiences occur during this period, when familiarity can breed laziness, if not contempt.• Report out: Create systems that measure and to them.

Share these results in regular reports.• Send-off: Leave them with something unexpected. At the end of routine meetings with clients, Webb might announce that they can expect a customized white paper to share with the rest of their team, or an instructional video of him elaborating on one of the meeting’s points.Webb jokes that he commits fraud at each touch point. “At every touch point, I tell a lie,” he says. “I tell them they will get a lot less than I know I’ll deliver.

I always exceed the baseline level of client expectation.”Camille Allen, Broker and retail business consultantBusiness: The Property FirmWhere: Durham, N.C.I started my career in national corporate sales—a young black woman often attending golf outings with old, white, male Fortune 500 CEOs.