In order to be successful in market research or in any business setting, you will have to learn quickly about client etiquette and customer relationships. Dealing with customers in a professional setting on a day-to-day basis is not something we take lightly at Drive Research. Managing clients in market research is equally as important as managing their market research project.
Here are 4 simple tips to help you with your client relationship building in market research, all of which are employed if you work with us here at Drive Research:
1. Be proactive - Anticipate your clients' needs and answer their questions before they ask. Think about what types of questions or issues your clients raise and have a plan in place or an answer ready for each of them. Manage their expectations.
2. Over communicate - Be upfront in your work processes and keep your client in the loop. A good standard here is to start with a lot of detail in early emails and work your way towards more concise emails down the road once you've built client trust. As a rule of thumb, our teams at Drive do not let a full week pass without touching base with each and every one of our clients.
3. Be transparent - When pieces of a project are unexpected or do not work as planned, think about next steps and corrective actions. Make procedural improvements to ensure it prevents the problem from happening again. Share what happened with your client and what you have already started doing to change it. This shows initiative.
4. Add some personality - We may be nerdy researchers at Drive but we have real lives outside of work. Our days are not (completely) spent working with our calculators and Microsoft Excel. We like to let our clients know about our personal interests.
Drive Research is a market research firm in NY. Questions about your next market research project or how Drive might be able to assist? Contact us below or send us an email at [email protected].