Lessons my clients taught me…and are still teaching!!

Having been in client management profiles throughout my professional experience, I always feel lucky to have worked in more than one industry to understand the client psyche. With all the experience, I still believe there is a lot to learn, and it will be an ongoing process for a lifetime.?

I have seen moments of anguish, disappointment, and joy that come our way from our clients. Such experiences turned me into a mature account handler that every company would be proud of, and I finally moved to manage a team of 30+ agents, team leads, and managers.?

More or less, my pre-entrepreneurial journey has been an exciting one, considering the mistakes and lessons I have learned from my personal experience and by observing my team over the years. Here I am trying to share a few prevalent errors, which, with the daily hustles of managing clients, we tend to ignore and miss the bus of being a better account handler.

1. Calling the client only when needed?

‘When was the last time you connected with the client?’ I enquired from one of the account managers about a churned client.?

After checking the records, 2 months back, he replied in embarrassment, understanding the tone and the reason for my question. It was not the 1st time I saw a pattern of churning clients, and his last call with those clients.

We, as account managers, often stay focused on the revenue-generating clients and miss connecting with the rest. In contrast, the primary key to client management is maintaining regular, meaningful conversations. We need to strategize across mediums and not rely on one communication channel like call. Some organisations have vast numbers of clients handed over per agent, and calling each of them every week seems impossible. Exploring communication mediums and using them at their disposal becomes a major differentiator.?

Don’t wait for the problem to arise or for a billing/renewal reminder to popup to remind you of that client. Find out practical reasons (from the client’s perspective) to connect with a client and stay in touch.?

2. Giving product training is a one time job

In an escalation I received from a client on the product not being worthy as per the client's expectations, the first thing I did was to check the product usage. To my surprise, the client started well, and then the usage declined. With the thought of getting deeper to understand the real reason for dissatisfaction, I called the client and discussed it with him. We realised there was no fault in the product. On the contrary, his requirements perfectly fit the product features. It was just that he joined the organisation a few months back, and he had a little idea on how to make full use of the product.?

We often get in a comfort zone and don’t keep up with their product understanding or the changes in their organization.To avoid such situations, the account manager needs to keep discussing/sharing different use cases of the features and asking for re-training sessions once a quarter.

3. Not asking the client’s quantitative expectations during onboarding?

There is always a standard checklist that we should follow during the client onboarding, which includes assuring that the client is appropriately trained, all the important contact numbers are shared, an escalation matrix, and a few more pointers.?

The same happens with the salesperson who closed the deal and transferred the deal to the onboarding manager (who is also the account manager in most cases).?

Did we miss anything on our list? Yes

We often don’t discuss the client's expectations, or even if we discuss, we keep it very general and miss on quantifying it. As a result, even the client’s feedback is limited to qualitative questions like ‘How are services going?’ or ‘Are you satisfied with the product?’

It is easier said than done.?

How can we quantify the expectations of a thousand clients?

Well, there is a solution for this problem, measurable parameters that we know will be important for every client, using your product/service KPI’s to measure the client success.

Every client has some prior expectations which can be different from the standard parameters (referred above). And, it is something that the account manager and the salesperson need to understand through an honest discussion with the client. It’s crucial not to limit such discussions to the onboarding process and use them regularly for a fair assessment.?

4. Relying too much on marketing e-mailers

An email pops up in my official inbox from my marketing team with the subject line:

‘10 ways you can use our services/product’. I open it, glance at it, close it, hit the archive, done.

It was an email sent to me, the account managers, and the clients.?

What I did with the email, there are chances most of our clients would have done it. I’m not saying marketing emails are of no use; they are! But, it’s a natural tendency to overlook the email that seems less valuable and skip to the other email, and many won’t even bother to open it.?

We rely too much on marketing communication to pass the product information to clients. And this dependency often puts us in a comfort zone and gives us a perception that the client is up to date with the product features. However, to get the best results, we have to optimise the marketing communication with personal efforts. It’s true that manual communication will make the task challenging to cover the mass, but mixing it with marketing communication can do wonders.

5. Best suggestions come only from high product usage clients

Category A: Uses the product/service to the fullest.

Category B: Using the product/service to the below level capacity.

Which one will you prefer for feedback or suggestions to improve the product/service??

Most of the answers said clients fall under Category A.

I believe the contrary, the best feedback I have got, were from the clients whose daily product usage was below average. The logical reason behind this is that Category A client's suggestion(s) will be more inclined towards the features that will attract the high usage client. Whereas the Category B clients will share suggestions leading to why they cannot use the product properly, which I believe will fit the masses and will be more inclined towards making the product valuable for the similar category of clients.

Not saying that it’s of no use to take feedback from high-usage clients, but we should make an extra effort to take input from category B clients during this process.

6. Asking for reference is a one-time activity

I always believe references are organic and should come similarly. Still, we all aren’t as lucky as Dropbox (and many startups with similar success stories) to get success through overwhelming word of mouth, so we make efforts to get the maximum references from our existing clients.?

We often have to ask for references from our long-served clients, and once we get a reference from them, we think that the mission is accomplished.?

That I have been rewarded for my long time servicing this client and now let's focus on some other clients for a reference.?

At times, we even shy away from asking for references repeatedly from a client. This becomes a significant reason for overall graphs of references going lower.?

We can always try to communicate the same over regular intervals but in different ways and mediums as a solution to this. We don’t have to be direct to ask for ‘reference.’?

For example, simple sentences like? ‘It would be great if you can connect us within your network.’ or ‘There must be someone in your network that would be the right fit for a product/service like ours.’ is a way to ask for a reference without even mentioning the word.?

The more we ask (without polluting it), the greater the chances of getting one.?

I am sure the above mistakes are somehow relatable to many, and when we look back at our journey (whether short or long), we wish we could have corrected them easily. I hope this will help you get slightly better in account management.