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This is Question 9 of my 10 part series on 10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Becoming a Full Time Freelancer.
How to Manage All Your Clients as a Freelancer?
Hey it's one thing to be well skilled in something. It's another thing to have good customer service skills. To be able to communicate well with people and your clients. To even have some fairly good life skills in general. But having great communication skills and being able to understand your buyers requirements and whims as well as establish a long lasting working partnership by delivering excellent quality work and customer service is the winning formula to being successful and getting hired again and again.
It sounds brutal to say it, but without having good communication skills, without good customer service skills. You will find it hard to get hired and build regular repeat buyers. So you may have some learning to do. I'm talking about your people skills, your life skills and your customer service skills.
How will you react when a client flips out on you or rages over something that is beyond your control? How will you react to abusive language and swearing and being called names not safe-for-work enough to repeat here? Are you thick skinned and cool/level headed enough to take it and know how to handle it like a true pro?
But more than this you may have to learn how to sell yourself as well! Learn how to send great killer emails and write excellent service pages and landing pages and how to come up with the perfect pitch to people looking for your skills on all the freelance sites and social media sites etc.
Plus when you start taking orders and things start picking up for you. And you are getting more sales than you can really manage, handle and complete. Then you may find yourself working flat out and misplacing things or not know who's order you should be working on and who's you need to pay the most attention to etc.
Questions to ask yourself then are;
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TommyCarey
With the advancement of support systems, plugins, scripts, etc. we can now set something up pretty quick and make it super simple to answer all of the emails we get.
Now I tell everyone that they need to focus on support just as much as they focus on the work they're doing for their clients. A good support system where the emails and tickets get answered in under a few hours will help increase the client retention
Managing my clients is a little easier because I now have a system in place where I can input the clients information and I will set up what I need to do during the month for each person/business. Anyone can do this with a simple calendar or a client management system where you can input client data.
If I don't set something up, I'll usually just work on one thing and move to the next right after I'm done. This way I'm always working on the clients campaign and I can stay on track. It's a pretty simple thing to do, but you can get side tracked pretty quick. You'll have to avoid procrastination and getting side tracked for this to work best. Sometimes I wish I had an office with no TV in it When I started out I was horrible at customer service. I was bad at it mainly because I was swamped with orders and when I did have time to answer emails I would be so burnt out from already working 16 hours in a row that I would avoid my emails because I knew it would be another hour of work. Doing this definitely annoyed some of my clients, but others did not care to even email me and that's what I liked lol. I just wanted to get the orders and do the work, that's all. Eventually I had my friend work with me and he handled all the emails, which was very nice, and I could just focus on work and R&D for the company. With the advancement of support systems, plugins, scripts, etc. we can now set something up pretty quick and make it super simple to answer all of the emails we get. Now I tell everyone that they need to focus on support just as much as they focus on the work they're doing for their clients. A good support system where the emails and tickets get answered in under a few hours will help increase the client retention :D Managing my clients is a little easier because I now have a system in place where I can input the clients information and I will set up what I need to do during the month for each person/business. Anyone can do this with a simple calendar or a client management system where you can input client data. If I don't set something up, I'll usually just work on one thing and move to the next right after I'm done. This way I'm always working on the clients campaign and I can stay on track. It's a pretty simple thing to do, but you can get side tracked pretty quick. You'll have to avoid procrastination and getting side tracked for this to work best. Sometimes I wish I had an office with no TV in it :D
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