Every outsourcing company always wants to have successful relationship with clients. Especially, it will be more difficult when all your clients are far away from you, and it is so hard for you to meet them directly and see their facial attitudes. You know well that it takes much time, efforts and even some cost to build strong outsourcing relationship. Here are some keys that can help you know how to build a strong outsourcing relationship.
Building Trust
Trust is very essential and critical for any relationship, and so is outsourcing relationship/partnership. Indeed, in the first time it is not easy to build trust, you need to build bridges of trust, try to communicate and show your enthusiasm every step. Everything you can do is to establish the foundations of trust. In fact, you should build the trust before and after the contract is signed. That is a long process, not only one or two times.
Be Proactive
Communicating is the most important part of any business. You need to communicate with clients or rather interact with clients in process of making a product. Normally, you will choose the way of communication via email, Skype, social networks and phone.
Try your best to stay in touch with the clients consistently with positive news. And remember to take up opportunities to get in touch when necessary and you know that they are ready for a talk. You can use chat sessions with the clients to clarify some detailed points. Furthermore, don’t forget to choose email conversations, because it has an advantage over the others when it doesn’t miss out any points, and you can easily find back later.
*Notes: Make sure that you will not interrupt clients when they are busy. If they are busy or not interested, let’s try next time. In email communication, if your client does not respond after one or two follow-ups, it is not advisable to keep pestering him/her. You should be able to understand that the customer is not interested for the time being and give him some time later.
Listening Clients
People said that "Two ears and one mouth - you should listen twice as much as you talk”. However, listening will be expressed when you listen your clients and have answers for the client’s queries. Do not let the customer feel that their valuable time is lost.
Therefore, you need to make sure that you pay attention and listen what your clients are saying. Listening is the best way to demonstrate your respect with others, so you have to listen all the time.
Good listening can help you to understand your clients, and improve your communication and capacity for empathy. Base on deeply understanding about client’s situation, you can have more experience to choose what words are best to use or which words to avoid.
Discuss mutually benefits
Sometimes you will get some problem or have different opinions with your clients, how can you solve it? The best answer is to focus on a discussion around benefits and find the best way to solve problems. By focusing on benefits, the parties reached a mutually beneficial arrangement without any argument at all. Collaborative problem solving is a good way to build relationship, while confrontation is a good way to destroy it.
Be Honest
No matter how big or small – never lie. It is no surprise that honesty is a key component of a healthy relationship, not only because it helps us avoid harmful breaches of trust, but because it allows us to live in reality as opposed to fantasy and to share this reality with someone else. Of course, every human being has their own unique perceptions of the world, but by sharing these perceptions with each other, we get to know each other for who we really are.
If you cannot agree that you should make an effort to tell the truth to one another, perhaps you have bigger fish to fry than simple honesty. Deciding that you want to have open but kind communication is an incredibly important step in establishing honesty ground rules.
Don't avoid an issue by hiding it or diminishing its importance. Do not hide tough issues; instead, make them prominent. Show the other side how the issue is being addressed and provide regular updates. More harm is done trying to "hide" an issue than flat out rejecting it. You don't have to say "yes" to build trust, but you cannot build trust by saying "maybe" when you know the answer is "no."
Take responsibility
All outsourcing software company have to answer this question: Is all outsourcing projects delivering as expected? The answer is: Not every project does. Absolutely right! In fact, according to a Dun & Bradstreet report, 25% of the companies it surveyed say their outsourcing projects don’t deliver as expected.
Thus, one important part of having a good relationship is keeping your promises with clients. Do what you say you are going to do, and do it within the time frame promised. If you cannot keep a promise, communicate that as early as possible. Recognizing the importance of promises, even small promises, because failing to keep even small promises can create large problems.
Manage the Process
Another aspect in outsourcing contracts is the manage issues in process of develop projects. A transaction can be managed in many ways. Don’t make the mistake of setting unrealistic deadlines to short-circuit the negotiation process – and then resetting deadline, and resetting the deadline again. Even with both sides working diligently, unrealistic deadlines affect confidence that the deal is adhering to any real schedule. And while this approach inevitably delays deal closings, the larger problem is the erosion of trust.
Improving Service Levels
Among the keys to getting outsourcing to deliver, quality of service and pricing are always together to become the most critical factor in long-term outsourcing success.
Therefore, more importantly, to implement successful innovation in outsourcing relationships, sourcing companies need to continue enhancing service-level improvement and increasing customer satisfaction as much as possible.
Document Everything
Actually, a strong relationship is built during the negotiation. At the end of each conservation or meeting, you need to have a documentation that clearly reflects the intentions of the parties. That is vitally important. It means that you need to make notes of everything and confirm what you said and what your client said after finishing an important conservation. That is very useful to make positive impression and a great way to get someone feeling good about you. Moreover, it will help you easily find back everything after a long time.
You are probably working on the benefits of outsourcing now and you want to build a strong outsourcing relationship. Hope this article can help you have a basic knowledge to build strong relationship with your clients.
Thanks for your reading.
By Thuy Le