5 Essential Tips for Successful Client Communication
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
As famous film composer John Powell once said, “Communication works for those who work at it.”
Without communication, nothing would be possible, and nothing would get accomplished, especially in this information technology age. With so many businesses living and working digitally, communication has never been more important for businesses. And with this digital wave, the number of avenues for communication has dramatically increased as well, illustrating how crucial maintaining effective communication is.
These days, everyone—including accountants and bookkeepers—has to put in serious, dedicated effort to reach and maintain strong client relationships and communication. However, as we mentioned, this digital age has opened a variety of communication channels and possibilities, making maintaining effective client communication that much more complicated.
So, in this post, we’ll help you understand what client communication is, why it’s so important for any business, and provide you with a few tips to enhance your practice’s client communication.
What is client communication?
Client communication is a generic umbrella term that encompasses any form of interaction you and your practice/business have with your clients, whether in the past, present, or future. Client communication can take the form of written communication—emails, messaging apps (Slack, Microsoft Teams), and invoices—to verbal communication—phone calls, in-person conversations, and voicemails—or physical communication—the body language you use when interacting face-to-face with clients. In the age of the Covid-19 pandemic, Zoom, Google Meets, and other forms of video apps are also forms of digital client communication.
Why is client communication important?
Client communication establishes and maintains trust between clients and your business. If a client trusts your business and what you offer, they are more likely to stay loyal to and steadfast with your business. When clients trust your practice and are loyal, this client satisfaction with your business not only brings in consistent profit but also encourages positive reviews and recommendations, bringing in even more profit and growth for your practice.
Additionally, utilizing a combination of the different forms of client communication is key to a successful business relationship and long-term growth. If you only focus your energy on one type of client communication, while it’s good to improve an area of your client communication, your other forms of client communication will disintegrate and ultimately dissatisfy your clients, likely leading to lower client retention.
For example, if you’re meeting with a client in-person, the non-verbal communication—body language, tone of voice, gestures, and facial expressions—is just as important as the words you verbally communicate and information/data you communicate via written documents or graphs. Your verbal and written words might demonstrate a professional and respectful relationship with your client, but if you don’t put effort into your non-verbal communication, your clients likely won’t trust you or return to your business.
Another example pertains to digital client communication via Zoom. With digital meetings, it’s as easy as a click of a button to enter a meeting. You can work on another task even up to a few minutes before the meeting starts. But, for example, if you don’t show up to a meeting on time, it might convey disrespect and disregard for the client's time and attention, so they won’t want to continue any business with your practice.
So, communicating with your client in a multitude of forms is key, especially for accountants and bookkeepers. And in the accounting and bookkeeping industry, being able to communicate vital financial information clearly, accurately, and respectfully is essential to any successful financial practice.
Tips to improve your practice’s client communication
Use the proper communication channels
The first step of using the proper communication channels is asking your clients how they prefer to communicate. You need to discover, for example, whether your client prefers using video chat over in-person meetings, messaging apps over phone calls, or emails over messaging apps. If they lean towards messaging apps, do they prefer to use Slack, GroupMe, or WhatsApp?
Establishing your client’s likes and dislikes and their business style—whether formal or more informal/casual—helps you determine how to best interact and communicate with your client to establish client trust, which leads to client loyalty and retention and being more productive and effective in your work. Weak client communication often results in lower productivity, as you or your client might be unsure of what is needed or what should be done, and a lower-value business.
So, to create and maintain successful client communication, correspond your practice to your client’s preferred communication methods, as it will make them more open to receive, understand, and follow through on your messages.
Did you know?❓❓
Client communication is one of the biggest issues accountants and bookkeepers complain about regarding their clients’ uncategorized transactions. Waiting around for responses, constantly exporting dozens of spreadsheets and emails, and even receiving incomplete responses is frustrating and a waste of your time.
If you’re looking for an app to improve client communication regarding clients’ uncategorized transactions and reduce the number of spreadsheets and emails you send to communicate with your clients, look no further than Uncat! 😸
Set up at least one automated reminder system
Every once in a while, we all might slip up and forget a deadline or forget to respond to an email. So, sometimes it’s helpful to have reminders in place—whether your own or from someone else.
You might worry about being annoying, spammy, or overbearing. And while some emails from your business to your clients can be—especially when you continuously promote a service, product, event, or new feature—when sending reminders, studies typically show that multiple reminders are more effective in generating quick responses.
According to a study from the Behavioral Scientist, a reminder email helped increase one-time donations to a charity by 66%. And within the accounting and bookkeeping industry, those numbers typically continue to grow with each additional reminder. As life gets busier and more projects and tasks pile onto our plates, it’s inevitable that clients might rely on reminders to get things done.
But that’s not something for accountants and bookkeepers to worry about themselves with manually calling, emailing, or messaging clients, as certain technology and accounting practice management software allows you to set up automated reminders that remind your clients. And these reminders will keep client communication lines strong and lead to customer satisfaction, resulting in a more successful, trustworthy, and profitable business.
Eliminate language barriers
While you and your clients might speak the same language or have communication channels or systems in place to understand each other’s language, in the accounting and bookkeeping industry, there is also the potential for language barriers.
Though you might be able to quickly and easily communicate with other accountants, bookkeepers, or professionals in the financial world, financial terminology and practices aren’t necessarily something anyone can whip out of their back pocket and comprehend. If you drop terms like accrual-basis accounting, return on investment (ROI), double-entry bookkeeping, or chart of accounts, it’s likely that the average person will stare at you with a confused, empty look on their face.
So, it’s essential to understand who your clients are and the nature of their business and employees to know what kind of language you can use in your communications. Sometimes, you just need to close the book on serious, frivolous financial or accounting jargon and speak to your clients at their level of comprehension and communication. Finding a common ground of language to communicate on will help establish a strong client relationship based on honesty, transparency, and trust for the future.
Set expectations from the get-go
If you fail to establish expectations, guidelines, and preferences from the beginning, you’re setting up your practice and client relationships for failure and too many hiccups down the road. So, laying down the terrain from the get-go is key for strong client communication, and the client onboarding process is one of the most important times to establish effective client communication.
Through client onboarding, you can proactively set your expectations and practices and learn about your clients’ needs and preferences. This establishes a clear understanding and playing field of what you and your client can anticipate and count on, preventing poor behavior and raising accountability on either side of the relationship. You can also follow the other tips through client onboarding and setting expectations early by learning about what channels to communicate through, what language to use, how often they want to communicate, and more.
⭐️ Need a resource to help with your client onboarding process? Check out Uncat’s Client Onboarding Checklist for Bookkeepers and Accountants! ⭐️
Be flexible
As we noted at the beginning of the post, there are a plethora of approaches to client communication, and different clients—which have thousands of different businesses and services—will have different preferences, so you can’t establish a rigid, standard communication strategy for all clients (unless you aren’t looking to grow your business or profit).
So, this final tip ties back to our first tip—using the proper communication channels—but you need to be flexible with what communication channels you’re open and willing to use and what kind of communication you convey.
Some clients might not want constant, daily communication with you. Some clients, for example, might be low-volume e-commerce clients and not require emails or video calls daily or weekly. Maybe they only need monthly communication. Or, maybe one client wants specific, granular details about their finances while the other simply desires a general summary. With so many potential varying preferences of clients, it’s crucial that your practice is flexible to accommodate the communication needs, habits, and wishes of your clients.
Want to see how Uncat can smoothen and strengthen your client communication? Start your free trial of Uncat today!