10 Best Practices for Client Relationship Management

Client relationships are the backbone of business growth. Strong, lasting client connections drive customer loyalty, enhance brand credibility, and improve overall reputation. In fact, 73% of business leaders attribute effective client relationship management (CRM) as a direct contributor to their success.

What is Client Relationship Management?

Client relationship management involves a strategic approach to engaging and delighting clients by using tools and practices that nurture these relationships. It’s about understanding when and how to interact and manage client relationships to meet both their needs and your organizational goals.

10 Best Practices for Client Relationship Management (& How Nifty Makes Them Easy)

Here’s a breakdown of the 10 client relationship management best practices with a focus on how Nifty can be used to address each challenge:

1. Get Your Clients to Participate

Involving clients throughout the project development process is essential to building strong relationships. Nifty facilitates client involvement by allowing you to share Goals and Milestones with just a click. Clients can track project progress and provide feedback in real-time, ensuring their expectations are met without having to ask for constant updates.

Nifty’s Solution: Clients can access a shared project board where they can monitor progress, see goal updates automatically, and give input—streamlining collaboration and keeping projects on track.

You can create Goals in Nifty with just 1 click:

You can also share these goals with your clients. Nifty Goals automatically tracks all the important milestones and tasks you need to hit for the end Goal to be achieved.

So, once you hit a particular milestone, the Goal status gets updated automatically.

✨ Create and share goals with your clients in Nifty.
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2. Respect Their Time

While client involvement is key, it’s equally important to respect their time. Over-scheduling meetings or asking for approval on every minor detail can cause frustration. Nifty allows you to maintain transparency without overwhelming the client by using automated project updates and task tracking.

There are several ways to respect your client’s time. You could assign a dedicated project manager or a customer success manager who is a single-stop resource for everything related to the project to service requests promptly.

Nifty’s Solution: Clients receive progress updates in real-time through Milestones and Goal tracking, reducing the need for frequent check-ins and lengthy meetings.

✨ Keep your clients updated without wasting time.
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3. Communicate Effectively

Active communication is a part of saving your customers’ time and building meaningful customer relationships with clients too. For starters, it involves proactive disclosure of information so that the client no longer has to waste time chasing it.

Say, for example, how eCommerce websites share routine order-related updates. Such constant and reliable communication makes information readily available and accessible. 

Staying in touch with your existing clients at all times also assuages any fear, concern, worry, or trepidation that they may have. As such, it promises customer retention by minimizing the possibility of a client fleeing to a competitor.

Nifty’s Solution: Nifty consolidates all project communication in one place with built-in chat, task comments, and @mentions to ensure no detail is lost. Team members and clients stay updated through a combination of synchronous (real-time chat) and asynchronous (comment threads) communication. This ensures clients are always in the loop without needing to ask for updates.

✨ Communicate with your team members and clients using Nifty.
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4. Connect Over Different Channels

Since we’re on the topic of communication, it bears mentioning that every exchange should take place across a bouquet of channels depending on the client’s likes and preferences.

Ideally, the communication stack should contain an array of synchronous and asynchronous forms of communication. Communication channels like phone calls, live chats, VoIP phone systems, in-person meetings, etc., fit in the former category, while asynchronous communication involves emails, messaging, and video recordings (Use a free screen recorder to create your recordings), etc.

You can explore best digital card solutions as an efficient way to share contact information across these various channels, ensuring seamless connections.

Project management tools like Nifty offer a similar blend of communication channels so that you can have a one-stop app to communicate than disparate ones.

Nifty’s Solution: Nifty integrates multiple communication channels, allowing teams and clients to connect through instant messaging, comments, and even video calls—keeping everything centralized. This avoids the hassle of switching between platforms and ensures all communication is documented for easy reference.

✨ Manage all your client communications in one place with Nifty.
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5. Build Personalized Relationships

The value of personalization can never be understated in relationship building. Personalization is one of the primary client relationship management best practices. It is also highly versatile, depending on the business’ technological maturity and data-harnessing availability.

For instance, personalization could be as simple as addressing the client by their name. Or it could be as complex as curating personalized client experiences based on their preferences and inspired by related customer cohorts.

Either way, it makes the client feel seen as an individual, which fosters a sense of loyalty. Lose this personalized touch, and it can cost you a whopping 62% of the client base!

Nifty’s Solution:
Nifty’s Custom Fields feature allows you to personalize project management by capturing client-specific details and preferences. You can create unique custom fields within tasks to track any relevant data that matters to your clients, providing them with a more personalized service experience.

✨ Use Nifty’s Custom Fields to tailor your workflow to client needs.
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6. Practice Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge sharing with prospective clients is as critical to operations as internal knowledge sharing. It instills confidence and brings all the stakeholders on the same page. It is even more appreciable in cases where the client does not possess the level of skill or expertise to understand the intricacies of their requirements.

Empowering, enabling, and assisting existing customers at this stage serves as a trust-building activity as it reflects on your domain authority and credibility. It also minimizes any possibility of miscommunication or misunderstanding as everything is openly discussed – right from any variations to the rationale behind it. As a result, a client is less likely to feel disgruntled from the outcomes.

Nifty’s Solution: Nifty’s project documentation feature allows you to share knowledge and resources seamlessly. With centralized project docs, clients can access critical information whenever they need it, ensuring they remain informed without needing frequent explanations or meetings.

✨ Share project knowledge seamlessly with Nifty’s documentation features.
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7. Keep an Open Mind

In order to build lasting customer and maintain positive client relationships, though, there are going to be moments when you will have to go the extra mile to please the clients. For example, you may have to squeeze in another feature on a tight deadline or throw something in gratis. Taking on such challenges can be tough, but not so much when you do it with an open mind.

Try to maintain objectivity and clarity of thought to accommodate such requests. That’s not to say that you become a doormat and accept anything the client throws at you. There are going to be moments when you will have to reject such requests as it may jeopardize future projects or projects.

The goal is to look at the larger picture – what is in the best interest of a project. Use that as a differentiator.  

Nifty’s Solution: Nifty’s flexible workflows allow teams to adapt to changing project requirements easily. With Custom Fields and dynamic task management features, you can accommodate new client requests on the fly while maintaining the overall project scope.

✨ Adapt to client requests with Nifty’s flexible task management.
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8. Maintain Transparency

Transparency is a precursor to accountability, and both are the pillars of client relationship building. We’ve already covered a few facets of transparency viz client participation, active communication, and knowledge sharing. Each of these will shed light on the internal workings of the organization and the various teams and departments involved. 

Businesses must embody transparency even when they make mistakes. After all, they are unavoidable to some degree. Even though it can be tempting to sweep it under the rug, practicing honesty and accepting accountability for any mishaps can help you build an authentic, long-lasting, personal connection.

Nifty’s Solution: Nifty’s built-in reporting and milestone tracking features offer real-time transparency into the status of a project. Clients can see which milestones have been hit, what tasks are pending, and any potential delays, ensuring full transparency without needing to ask.

✨ Keep your clients in the loop with Nifty’s real-time project tracking.
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9. Under-promise, Over-deliver

One of the gravest mistakes that certain businesses make is that they get so swept up by the idea of taking on a project and winning over customers that they end up making tall promises and over-committing.

The result, in some cases, can be quite underwhelming. The contrary forms one of the best practices for client relationship management. Rather than overselling yourself, promise what is realistically possible.

Do you know, you can create project scope, set milestones, document changes & more in just one tool, Nifty?

While you’re at it, identify what’s best for the project and try to go above and beyond – a nice little present for your customer’s trust. Even if such a surprise falls through, the customer was never expecting it in the first place. And in case everything goes right, the client will appreciate getting more than their money’s worth.

Nifty’s Solution: Nifty allows you to set realistic project scopes by breaking down tasks, setting achievable milestones, and tracking progress. This ensures you can meet deadlines efficiently and, when possible, deliver more than initially promised, helping you exceed client expectations with ease.

✨ Set realistic goals and exceed expectations with milestone and task tracking.
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10. Obtain Feedback & Reviews

Client feedback and reviews are vital tools for assessing what went right (or wrong) in service delivery. Some may even contain valuable nuggets of information on how you can improve your product and services. Opening up this feedback channel not only allows them to feel heard but also demonstrates how much you value their viewpoint.

In addition to capturing such feedback, taking reparative action to amend commonly occurring mistakes and improving the client experience can allow you to build positive relationships and lasting customer relationships. Don’t forget to thank or reward the customers for their time and valuable opinions.

Nifty’s Solution: Nifty provides an integrated client collaboration space where feedback can be captured through comments, tasks, or project discussions. Clients can share their reviews in real time, and you can immediately respond and take action, ensuring that their concerns are addressed promptly.

✨ Capture client feedback effortlessly through Nifty’s collaboration tools.
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Conclusion

That’s a wrap on some of the best practices for client relationship management.

To reiterate, client relationship management is a two-person dance where businesses must keep to the beat and take the lead whenever the tempo begins to slide. Further, to enjoy the benefits of client retention and relationship-building, they need to leverage the right set of people, processes, and technologies to make it happen.

Tools like Nifty empower businesses to stay on top of their games – whether it is communicating information on time, involving stakeholders, or capturing feedback. Gain granular control of your project so that you can serve your clients better.

📌 Manage your clients easily with Nifty. Sign up for free. 🎉

FAQs

What are the 4 strategies of relationship management?

The four strategies of client relationship management include:

1. Retaining customers,
2. Fostering loyalty,
3. Maintaining profitability and
4. Delivering satisfaction.

How do you effectively manage client relationships?

Some of the client relationship management best practices include:

1. Active client participation
2. Proactive client communication
3. Diversity in communication
4. Relationship personalization
5. Knowledge sharing
6. Staying open to ideas
7. Delivering above expectations
8. Setting realistic goals
9. Capturing and acting on feedback

What makes a good client relationship manager?

A good client relationship manager knows how to imbibe the spirit of transparency, value-driven communication, and client involvement to identify what is best for the project at hand.