9 tips on client communication from Wrike’s customer-facing team
By: Artem Gurnov
Tags: Communication, Wrike, Customer Success

We have a very ambitious mission here at Wrike: to help our clients do the best work of their lives. In order to achieve it, every Wriker working in a customer-facing role needs to be insanely productive. This is the first article in our series where our colleagues will share tips and tricks they use in their daily work to achieve amazing results. We’ll start with 9 tips on client communication.

1. Florencia Bechelli, renewals manager

Now more than ever we need to think outside the box and work on building a close bond with customers to get timely responses and secure retention. Ask for help if needed (brainstorming and teamwork are wonderful!). Finding the balance between human empathy and business needs can be hard, and with challenges on the rise, I think it’s a good moment to improve ourselves as good listeners. Ultimately, we learn that sometimes we win and sometimes we lose, but whatever the result, it must be done with effort and motivation.

2. Mandy Fisher, senior customer success manager

Always turn on your video as it helps build a more personal relationship when you can see someone’s face. Be empathetic, and communicate in a way so the customer knows you understand their pain. Communicate the action items at the end of the call, re-state what they say to make sure you understand them, and ask them to tell you more when you don’t understand.

3. Maria Panteleeva, senior customer success manager

I always do my best to build trust when communicating with clients, provide honest responses, and offer all possible solutions to the customer’s problems. Also, I put aside some time in the beginning of the conversation for human talk. Clients always appreciate that.

I always turn off any negative emotions when talking to clients. Sometimes customers may raise their voices, but for me, the most important thing is to listen, try to understand the client and respond accordingly, which has a positive effect on the conversation.

4. Marina Konopelko, customer success manager

I’m confident that a good relationship is built on trust. Humans are emotional creatures and trust would more likely be built on emotions rather than rationality. When a customer shares some personal information during the call (i.e., she loves football or was born in Brazil) — remember it (and write it down somewhere). It’s highly likely that this information will be useful later and help build dialogue. What’s very important is being sincere and natural.

Every time I prepare for a call, I write down a goal. I also prepare the agenda, but I’m ready to be flexible with it. It’s important to have one or two goals that you’d like to achieve during the call. It helps to focus the conversation on the most important things and, as a result, you won’t waste time on anything irrelevant. People value their time and if you can reach the goal of the call in the first 15 minutes, you can “give back” the remaining 15 to the client. The customer will be grateful.

5. Matt Williams, manager, customer success team

If you’re struggling to schedule time to meet with a client, simply pick a generally available time in the morning or afternoon (i.e., 8:00 a.m. or 3:00 p.m.), and send a calendar invite to your client without directly asking them if they’re available to meet. 75% of the time they’ll accept the meeting and you can get the call you’ve been desperately trying to land!

6. Petr Kunc, customer success manager

When discussing specific issues, ensure that you fully understand what the issue is before searching for the solution. When providing the solution make sure the customer understands what you mean. There’s always room for misunderstanding.

Use the customer’s language. I don’t mean the actual language but communicate in a way that’s easy for the customer to understand. Use metaphors and show the customer what you mean, so the customer can imagine how they’d use your suggested approach.

7. Renee Thomas, manager, customer success team

Use templates as skeletons — your template should be a structure for you to fill up with details applicable to the customer. Be mindful of high and low context cultures especially when emailing. Consider utilizing all your channels — email, phone, LinkedIn, etc. Have a purpose to all outreach and consider the goal of each communication (inform, schedule meeting, elicit feedback, etc.)

8. Sean Martin, customer success manager

Eliminate the words “unfortunately” and “but” from your vocabulary. They both have negative connotations. Also, limit your exclamation points. If you have none in your email, that’s good. If you have one that’s OK. If you have more than one, people won’t take you seriously.

9. Zach Wolfe, senior strategic customer success manager

Personalizing every email I send is something I always try to do. It’s easy, especially when we’re doing outreach campaigns, to send canned emails to our book of business. I’ve found that it makes a big difference to try to personalize each email to include something from the last call I had with the client, some news I’ve heard about their company, or something else that lets them know that I pay attention during our calls.