This year, our management team decided we needed to have more personal contact with our larger clients. We’re a growing company and sometimes it’s easy to forget how you came to be successful, which in our case was delivering the best customer service possible to our clients. We decided to get back to basics – seeing our clients face-to-face on a quarterly basis. Sometimes that means we visit them, and at other times clients would come visit us.
When we’re onsite with clients, they see us working on their problems - not just that we were on a conference call for a few minutes once a week - they see us working all day on their problems, side by side with them. That’s the personal dimension - building relationships and rapport. You’re having lunch and dinner with them, sharing stories - goodwill and trust naturally begins to build.
That’s something I think about a lot - you have to have a reservoir of goodwill with your clients because we’re going to have problems, no matter how good you are. It is how you deal with them that makes all the difference. If you already have a reservoir of goodwill built up with clients, it can help carry the relationship through stressful situations.
But if you haven’t made this investment in time and effort with the client, if we don’t go there or they don’t come to see us and make that connection, when the client gets frustrated, there’s a chance that they might start rethinking our relationship. You can’t draw on something you haven’t built up, and you never know when you’re going to need some client goodwill to draw on.
When clients come to visit us, what we’ve found is that they have one of two perceptions of our company. The first is that we are a small company, there’s maybe only eight or nine people working for us, because those are the only folks they’ve talked to. This handful of people is overworked and that’s why there aren’t enough people to fix problems as fast as they’d like. The second perception is that we are this gigantic company, because a lot of clients are used to dealing with big companies, and that the only reason they aren’t getting what they want is because they’re caught up in in big-company bureaucracy, so no one is paying attention to them.
What they discover when they come here is that it isn’t either of those things. First off, they notice there are more people working here than they’d thought, since they’d only ever spoken with the folks they deal with directly. The second thing they realize is how many other customers we have. That they are not our only client is something people know intellectually, but when you’re here walking the floor and seeing firsthand just how many things our support teams are working on and that everyone is busy all the time – then they understand.
So there’s another point - we are bigger than you think and we’re growing. We can tell clients we’re hiring such and such a position, but when they get to meet some of our newest employees, and you say “come meet Rhett and Alexandria, and oh, here’s Rachelle” and you get to know them, where they’re from, where they went to school, it builds the rapport and relationship.
So far, a lot of what I’ve talked about involves being completely transparent with clients, which requires a big shift in how you think about your business. To let clients see how you perform; sometimes things that you do well, and sometimes things you don’t do so well. This is another byproduct of having goodwill and trust built up with the client – enough so you can admit you don’t have all the answers all the time, but you’ll do whatever it takes to get them and share the results.