Starting a project with a new customer is more than just a win for your business – how you manage that process, in combination with the end result, will be a key factor for referrals and ongoing business. Essentially, how you guide your customers once they’re on board can be more powerful than any marketing effort.
In many cases, a customer can feel like a casualty because they don’t have any idea what to expect throughout an engagement. What are the project milestones? What can they expect from you in terms of communication? How are you going to make them feel comfortable throughout the entire process?
For the sake of this discussion, we’ll call your offering a “project.” In project work there are two essential ingredients: people and the useful exchange of ideas. Without people nothing gets done and without communication nobody knows what to do.
Typical project people spend a lot of time planning, organizing, doing and fixing but often pay little heed to communication. As a result, the communication may be inadequate, of poor quality or one-way.
Communication not only keeps everyone up-to-date on the project progress, but also facilitates ownership of major project decisions and milestones. To ensure the success of a project much information, including expectations, goals, resources and status reports, needs to be communicated on a regular basis to the customer as well as any other key stakeholders.
Here are a couple of critical tips that can help make this process seamless:
- Project plan up front: Before the project kicks off, document the milestones and deliverables and communicate what and when those are with your customers. Ask for their opinion and buy-in.
- Anticipate customer questions and frustrations: Know that there are going to be parts of the process around which customers need clarity. By anticipating and answering those questions, you’re able to establish a trusting connection between the two parties.
- Ask how they want to be communicated with and updated: Some prefer e-mail updates, others like regular conference calls and still others want to meet in person. Adjust to their style and you’ll make them feel more comfortable throughout the process. But customers shouldn’t have to ask for an update – it should be regular facet of your service or project.
- Create a mid-project customer satisfaction survey: This offers customers the opportunity to be candid about topics they may otherwise not be actively thinking of or are hesitating to tell you. Also remember to survey at the end of the project. In both cases, make sure that you’re actually going to do something with the information once it’s asked for.
Remember that communication through the process is more than just a “nice to have” – it’s actually an investment in the future of your business. A happy customer is both a repeat customer and a referring one!
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