How to Build Client Trust: A Q&A with Our Client Success Manager

At DemandLab, we take a unique approach to each client engagement. It’s based on best practices, deep experience, and client needs—and delivers short- and long-term business impact. Our Client Success team is crucial in building, developing, and advancing client relationships.

Maintaining a longtime relationship between client and agency requires a relentless focus on quality and communication. As the leader of DemandLab’s Client Success team, Chen Bian plays a major role in building client trust and driving client value and success.

Here’s some of what she had to say about this relationship.

How can you ensure an agency and client are on the same page (beyond the basics, such as a Statement of Work) when working together?

One way is to be upfront about timing. We can be optimistic, but for the most part, if something can’t be accomplished, I will tell the client it can’t be done—at least not exactly what they are asking in the time they are asking. It’s about explaining why you are saying no to something and how you can say yes.

Here’s an example: We sometimes can divide a project to deliver it by a certain date. Or if clients have unused resources toward a project, they sometimes ask if they can do another project with those hours.

Sometimes it’s possible if what they’re requesting is within the same kind of skill set. But if it is a different skill set that requires different team members whose time we’d need to reserve, I’d say something like, “If you would like to do this three months down the line, that’s a possibility.”

What, in your opinion, makes DemandLab different from other agencies? What about the way we work stands out?

For a long time, martech was the hot new thing. Now, everyone is struggling with the idea that it’s par for the course. How can you be bold and innovative when it seems like we’ve already figured out the best way to use the technology?

At DemandLab, we have very deep technical expertise. Not many agencies can do the type of customized work of making lots of different systems work together.

But that’s only a portion of what we do—and much of it comes down to how we communicate with clients. We put the service side first in a way I don’t think many other organizations like ours do.

Sometimes we’ll even refer clients to others—such as other agencies or contractors— if what they’re asking is out of our scope. Something like data cleaning—a manual process that might require additional labor—we might refer out.

A client’s toolkit isn’t limited to our agency: That’s great. That means every day, I get to learn more about the support they have available to them, and I can give better advice.

We keep the client’s best interests at heart. They trust we won’t sell them just anything, but when we do have a proposal and a new product relevant to them, they’ll listen.

We prioritize our team and their time, and we also prioritize our clients and their time.

How can you reduce bottlenecks on projects and in the relationship overall?

We work with our clients to clarify how capacity works and the best ways to work within what’s been planned for the week or month. If things are going to go outside of that, we will need to hold extra capacity to ensure there are people always available to help during “squeeze periods.”

For example, if you’re building emails for campaigns, you’re not usually creating three emails a week for the entire year; you’ll always have peaks and valleys. It’s more likely to be five or six emails one week and one or even none for other weeks. People are our resources, and they typically work a balanced number of hours each week. For this reason, we strive to maintain consistency within the workflow. We always do our best to accommodate emergencies, but we can also work together to ensure fewer of them.

What’s the best way to give and get feedback in the agency/client relationship?

Our clients are good about giving feedback, and at every kickoff meeting for a new project, we have a point person who’s their main contact, as well as a secondary point of contact should they need it. And we stay in close communication with our key stakeholders. Most of the feedback we get is about process or communication rather than the quality of work, like saying something will be ready that day, but needing to clarify it won’t be available until 6 pm that day.

Sometimes clients ask us for feedback, too. We have strong enough relationships with them that occasionally when they bring on a new hire, we do some of their training and onboarding or recommend training. It’s our goal to help them see solutions and streamline their processes.

We all want our teams to be good.

So make sure to act on the feedback you receive. Otherwise, people will stop giving it. Similarly, you need to listen. When you stop listening, people will stop telling you things.

How would you define trust in the client/agency relationship?

When there is trust, there is a whole lot less work for everyone involved.

If we develop high-quality work, clients are not spending their time scrutinizing our work. That can take up a lot of time and bring about a downward spiral of them wondering why it takes so long to complete projects. It’s hard to climb out of that.

You have to know what you’re talking about. Deliver quality. Own up to any mistakes. Demonstrate you have someone’s back.

It goes back to understanding that clients are people, too! They have their own teams and stakeholders. They’re just trying to get through their day, also. So if you encounter a problem, don’t run away or ignore it. Address it. Tell them what’s going on so you can show them you have it under control, and they can have something to respond to if their stakeholders ask. That’s a way to build trust.

And when you do that, the clients advocate for you. They come to you with a new project and say, “Can you help with this, too?”

To learn more about how DemandLab’s Client Success team can help grow your business, contact us.