Freelancers live and die by their reputations and with last week being National Customer Service Week, it seems like a good time to revisit the do’s and don’ts of looking after your clients.
We asked Derek Williams, the chief executive of The Wow! Awards (national customer service awards) whether he thought freelancers competing against creative agencies could outshine the competition in the service stakes.
He told Freelance UK: “Being responsive, flexible and caring are important elements of any relationship and freelancers can outperform ‘bricks and mortar’ design/ad agencies on all three accounts. When I started my first business I was up against huge organisations and won. The feedback I received was that I had responded, delivered what they wanted, and they believed I cared about their businesses.”
Williams adds that looking at things from a different perspective can be beneficial. “It’s about getting onside with the customer and looking at things through their eyes and taking into account not just what they need but what they really want. Very often people try to sell what they think the client needs, rather than what they want.”
Furthermore, with no layers of agency staff to wade through, a freelancer can build long-lasting business relationships with their clients. As the sole point of contact, the freelancer has the opportunity to build trust, the CEO explained: “Customer service is critically important to almost everyone because people buy from people rather than organisations.
“Almost all decisions are based on relationships and people choose to work with those they trust. For freelancers to win clients, it’s about delivering customer service and value for money. But importantly, it’s also about reliability, integrity and consistency, because we go to and use the people we trust. Freelancers have the opportunity to build closer relationships over the larger agencies with their glossy promotional marketing and a hierarchy of staff.”
Asked if customer service might have fallen off the list of priorities and on to the ‘nice to have’ list as clients cut costs and frills, Williams was adamant: “If anybody thinks customer service is ‘nice to have’ they are shooting themselves in the foot, reloading and shooting themselves in the foot again! In this scenario, it is not about buying a product where shoppers can check through online portals for pricing, it’s about the relationship and understanding what the client wants and meeting their needs including delivering a great service, a quality result to the timings they want and the price they have agreed.”
Derek Williams' two ‘golden rules’ for excelling at customer service are:
Golden Rule number 1: Understand the lifetime value of the client. Business success is based on the number of clients you have, how often they buy from you and how much they spend.
Some organisations are so desperate to reach out and win new clients they miss the opportunity to sell more to existing clients. The Golden Rule is to keep your clients, keep them coming back and always look for new ways they can do business with you. For example, supermarkets are excellent at finding new ways they can do business with their customers. They used to be the milk and bread shop and now they sell petrol, newspapers, postage stamps, clothing, gifts and a wide range of other products.
Golden Rule number 2: Discover the meaning of integrity. You can't say customers are most important to you or staff are your most important asset and then make negative comments or talk behind their backs. Have integrity in everything you do as we all send out messages, whether verbal or non-verbal, and these make an impression.
Be the best you can and go to exceptional lengths to please a customer, so if you are a freelancer be a great freelancer. Martin Luther King, Junior commented: “Whatever your life’s work, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead and the unborn could do it no better.”
Oct 12, 2009
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