May 29, 2020
Conduit Digital has consistently created incredible results for our clients and their campaigns. Communicating effectively with your clients, as well as internally, is a key factor in creating a successful client experience. Do you want to know the secrets to effective communication? It may be easier than you think! Our Director of Client Experience Tim C. Burke, Director of Products Rob Burke, Senior Manager of Client Experience Jessica Applegate, and Social Advertising Manager John Smithson sat down to discuss how effective communication has enabled us to become one of the fastest-growing agencies in the world.
How To Communicate Effectively
There are many different ways to communicate effectively with your clients. In fact, here are some of the top ways our Senior Manager of Client Experience Jessica Applegate communicates with clients:
Be Positive
Coming off in a positive way opens the door for positive communication. Approaching a problem positively is how your clients will listen and be engaged. Many times when you are communicating, especially through a message, what you are trying to say may be misinterpreted.
Remember The Client’s Goals
The intent behind every decision always comes back to their initial goals. Remembering their goals will give you insight into what the client is trying to say, and the message they are trying to get across. When you offer a full suite of products, it can be hard to remember the client’s overall goals as well as their goals for each product. Keeping these goals in mind when communicating with the client will help you to execute those results better, as well as provide optimizations and insights that better align with those goals.
Anticipate Your Client’s Needs
When you understand the client’s goals, it becomes easier to anticipate their needs and wants. Understand the intent behind the client’s message and anticipate what their follow up message will be. Doing this helps prepare your agency for what the client will say next. Simply responding to the client’s questions is ok communication. Anticipating what they are going to say next and being prepared for that will greatly increase the client’s trust in you.
“Good Communication Is Like Dancing”
They say that it takes two to tango. Communication is a lot like that. You need to know where your client is going to go next. This will help you to save time not only in your communication with the client, but internally as well. You will be able to address multiple concerns in one message, saving you a headache down the road.
Communication can go in so many different ways, especially with all the ways we can communicate today. Once goals are established, it comes down to actionable next steps. One way to do this is to always iterate back to the client what they asked for in the first place. This helps frame the conversation around a topic that is familiar to the client and helps to get all parties on the same page.
By reiterating the client’s concerns, your agency can avoid miscommunication issues later on. It also makes it easier to ensure that any actionable next steps are actually getting done. Don’t let your next steps remain in limbo because the client didn’t understand the communication.
Internal Communications
Having effective internal communication is key when it comes to properly executing campaigns. From the Ad-Ops side, having a defined and repeatable process is super important. Often times, analysts have to explain technical things in laymen’s terms. This means the analyst has to be well-versed in the data, be able to pull out notable insights, and be able to effectively relay these insights to the client experience team. This all starts with a process.
Some of the most successful companies in the world such as McDonald’s or Ford were built on processes that helped them to be more efficient than their competitors. The same is true for modern digital agencies.
At Conduit Digital, we take advantage of internal communication platforms such as Teamwork and Slack. The Customer Experience Team maximizes every ounce of the Teamwork Platform to make sure we’re the Leaders of Proactive Communication! In fact, we use this revolutionary platform for:
Client Communication
Creative Asset Library
Form Storage
Client Milestones
And everything else regarding your client’s campaign!
Transparency Is Key
Just as it is increasingly important to be transparent about your clients’ performance and data, being able to effectively communicate these results with your clients will help you to gain far more credibility than your competitors. It is important to ensure your outbound and internal communications are not only effective, but actually help you to gain.
When it comes to client communication, transparency is one of, if not the biggest, factor. However, it is not just data transparency, but also transparency in deadlines, results, and deliverables. Having a dedicated client experience team has enabled us here at Conduit Digital to bridge the gap between client expectations and agency performance. Our in-house team enables us to effectively and accurately lay out exactly what kind of deliverables they are paying for, how our services affect client ROI, and what campaign performance results to expect.
One of the ways we remain transparent and open with our clients and their end-clients is through our revolutionary Live Reporting. Our completely transparent Live Report is updated 24/7 with the essential data and KPIs your clients need to see. We do this so that our Agency Partners and their clients are always clear on goals, expectations, and performance. We even write a campaign narrative to explain the insights from our analysts! By offering a similar live data report, you can be sure that you are always on the same page and are built for success.
Live Report Example
What Not To Do
Gone are the days of unclear deliverables and weeks going by without client engagement. If your agency is not putting a priority on client communication, you will fall behind your competitors. Only by creating clear internal processes and prioritizing internal communication will you be able to communicate effectively with your clients. Develop a repeatable process and you will be able to scale your agency.
Conclusion
Closing the disconnect between client expectation and performance will be a key factor for any successful agency in 2020. It is more important now than ever to ensure you have the team and infrastructure in place to properly execute effective communication not only with your clients, but within your company as well.
Conduit Digital works with thousands of clients every single month and we know from trial and error and experience that having a client communication process that works is one of the keys to successful client communication.
