3 Tips To Improve Your Startups Client Management Process

Startups Client Management Process
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Client management is a hat you must wear if you intend on keeping your startup’s doors open. Even with the proper project management tools (meeting deadlines and finishing a project within the allocated budget), you will most likely struggle to fulfill customers’ demands without appropriate and effective client management policies. 

That’s where the client management process comes into play. How your yet-to-be-established venture handles its relationships with its customer base ultimately determines if you will keep growing your market share, improve your product/services and stand out from your competitors. 

The client management process goes a long way from just ensuring you deliver high-quality deliverables and client satisfaction. You will have favorable client retention rates, authentic brand loyalty, and most importantly, positive reviews and feedback from your startup’s clientele. 

But how can your startup achieve, master, and importantly, improve how to manage its clients and maintain good relationships effectively? 

3 Tips to Improve Your Startups Client Management Process

1. Use Customer Portal

In this fast-paced modernization era, you probably have heard or, even better, incorporated client portals in your startup’s operations. If, on the contrary, we’ve got you covered, 

A customer or clientele portal is typically a secure website or web application, only accessible to a particular client, and they can access your startup’s information relevant to their projects. From the portal, and at any time, your clientele can have access to the status of their orders, policies, deliveries, any new updates, and importantly, they can send requests. 

In Layman’s language, a customer portal provides a secure stream for data sharing and team collaborations. 

Check out how your startup can benefit from customer portals:

  • Streamlined internal and customer communications.
  • Enhanced client experience and retention levels.
  • Better visibility and access to instantaneous information. Even better at any time of the day or year.
  • Customers can make payments online hence an increase in your startup’s cash flow. Most client portal software offers features of document approval, invoices, and billing facilities. 
  • Also, customer portals provide features for team collaborations within a single platform instead of going through several software programs or channels.

Needless to say, a startup with customer portals appears more modernized, professional, and established compared to your competitors and even big brands lacking such software.

As lucrative as customer portal software might appear, a wrong approach or identifying a faulty client portal software could be expensive and useless. Therefore, always settle for portal software that is easy to utilize and customize regarding your startup’s requirements. 

SuiteDash, Nifty, and monday.com are some prevalent and apt customer portal software.

2. Prioritize Weekly Updates and Reports

Proactively sending reports and updates regularly to your clientele keeps them in the loop concerning their projects. This way, you can avoid and limit constant emails from your customers inquiring for regular status reports., 

Regular updates and reports, preferably weekly, ensures there’s transparency in the details of the project. Weekly updates summarizing your achievements and activities, decisions made through the project provide your team and clients know whether you are on schedule or if there is any matter that needs to be addressed. 

Be upfront about timelines and any issues with your customers’ projects. Communication is an essential factor in managing clients and keeping them in the loop. 

Project management platforms such as Trello or slack are effective in ensuring your clients are up-to-date with their project’s progress. 

3. Use Automation

Integrating automation into your client management process leads to better customer satisfaction and enhanced marketing efforts. How? 

With automation, all clientele tasks are performed by a program, consequently reducing human errors, enhancing faster response to your clients’ queries, and enabling more productive resource allocation. 

For instance, with customer management software, you can automatically automate the task of invoicing your customers after a particular duration. More to that, there are several other things you can automate. Along these lines, you can focus on other tasks. 

Even better, with sales force automation systems, your startup can oversee a broader perspective of its operations such as sales, marketing, and hyper-personalization.

Since you can locate all your customers’ essential information within customer management software, you can retrieve any client-specific data with a click. Intuitively your startup’s sales team can sort any customer issues based on issues faced, the name, and the urgency of their problems. This way, you can attend to all calls and resolve any customer issues promptly. 

Automation enhances customer satisfaction scores and effective client management. Also, when approaching potential customers, you can employ automation to send follow-up messages through email. This saves you all the hassle of manually going through email replies to pinpoint prospective customers.

Final Thought

Effective client management translates into a better working environment and the ability to improve the outcome of a project. With an optimized client management process, you can expand your startup, ensure more brand recall and significantly grow your customer base.