Throughout my career I’ve been on both sides of the service provider/client relationship. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of conflict. Even the strongest of business relationships will have issues from time to time.
Insurance agency owners spend the majority of their career as service providers. They don’t gain a lot of experience being a client. This can create problems when conflict arises over a particular account or client. Empathy is vital in resolving client conflicts and it can be hard to empathize when you have no experience of the other guy’s situation.
Empathy isn’t the only way to resolve conflicts with clients. There are four other steps you need to consider.
Be Open With Your Client
First and foremost, be honest with your client. If there’s a problem, tell them about it. Don’t hold information back. Your instinctive reaction may be to try to resolve an issue before the client finds out about it. That only leads to greater tension if the client realizes you’ve been keeping things from them. Trust is vital for a successful relationship with your client; you need to be open in order to retain that trust.
Fix the Problem
When a problem does arise, you should act as swiftly as you can to resolve it. Talking to the client and calming them down may feel like the most important task at that point, but it is largely irrelevant. If your mistake has made a client unhappy, correcting the problem will make them happy again. No apology will change that fact. Obviously you need to let the client know how you’re resolving the problem, but make sure you are resolving it first.
Focus on Your Strengths
If the client conflict is caused by an issue that is out of your hands, you may not have an immediate fix. In that situation you need to go back to your core strengths. You have built a career out of adding value to your service. Resolving conflict requires similar skills. Your client wants to see action when problems arise, even if that action doesn’t resolve the immediate issue.
Don’t Get Sidetracked
It’s most important that you avoid being sidetracked by client conflict. When problems arise it can be easy to think of that client in the context of that problem alone. In a perfect world, your client will assess your performance based on your entire relationship, not your last contact. Have you ever got upset with a client because they seemed to focus only on a recent mistake? Why did they forget about the years of great service? The reason is simple, it is human nature. What can you do about this? We would suggest that you continue to perform at the highest possible standard. If you do, the client will forget about the mistake and focus on the entire relationship.
Personal Thought
We would suggest that judging someone on the long term relationship versus the last contact is something that is even important in our personal lives. Focus on the positive and don’t dwell on the negative. Great advice but hard to execute.
