Introduction

Effective customer service brings 86% of the customers back to a brand as long-term accounts. Being of such importance, companies are relying on client partners to do a strategic and effective job of customer service. The role of a client partner is crucial and complicated.

Such a role involves working very closely with the clients to understand their requirements, end goals, and expectations. Knowing the clients better and then adding value through marketing research and query resolution is how a client partner can elevate any customer’s experience. A client partner’s playbook can help streamline and guide them through different scenarios of their job roles.

What is the role of a client partner?

Client partner is a customer-facing role in an organization that emphasizes providing customer service experience to existing and prospective clients. They are responsible for building rapport with clients and managing their relationships for the company.

They often work with the company’s clients and potential prospects to understand and manage them better while learning their objectives and priorities. While the ultimate goal is better customer experience, it includes a lot of hard work, attention to detail, and maneuvering.

A typical client partner’s role would include several responsibilities such as client engagement, client retention, higher customer lifetime value, upselling, lesser churn rate, and building customer loyalty. A lot of these areas can be transformative to a business’s success and generate a proportionate revenue.

What is a client partner’s playbook?

The role of the client partner is to work heavily with the client directly. As such, they have a responsibility to represent a company in the correct way. The engagement that the clients have with the client partner will influence their entire experience. It compels clients to work with a company again (or not!)

So, it is crucial to standardize the client partner’s work. Over here, a playbook acts as a rule book and a guide to the client partner on how to operate, communicate, and treat the client. Such a playbook can act as a common frame of reference between different client partners within a company and can help create a unified brand voice while treating a customer.

What is the need for the client partner’s playbook?

Every client partner in the organization has to perform their job in a standard manner. As an organization, it is critical to make sure every client partner is consistent about their behavior with clients. The brand voice must not be hampered, and the client partner’s work should represent the company’s mission and vision.

While the traditional way to provide them with training and information can help, there is a need for a much more robust way to guide client partners. A playbook can be their guide to finding answers or tips for any situations that they face. This can be a tool where they can find a clear response or action to deal with the client and get to a win-win situation.

Below are some of the problems that companies face if they do not have a unified framework for client partners:

• Inconsistent customer service:
  If there is no standard framework for treating customers, client partners may not be able to share the same level of customer service to all customers. In fact, a lack of guidelines can even lead to sharing misinformation or wrong resolutions, leading to consequences.
• Operational challenges:
  Without a set of protocols, every client partner will respond to different customer escalations based on their judgment, communicate through their tone, and use the set of tools/processes they prefer. These would lead to operational challenges for the company and the clients.
• Lack of upselling:
  To upsell, client partners must understand the client’s requirements and goals and then attempt to add value. Without the right strategy in place, every client partner will have varied results and will impact the revenue directly.
• Losing a customer:
  Not having a reliable and uniform response from the client partner can represent a lack of professionalism and create mistrust among clients. Every partner must respond with a similar approach every time.
• Ineffective training:
  Not having a strategic plan would reflect different levels of training within the client partners. It gets more challenging, and there is a good chance that some client partners can miss some crucial training elements. This would ultimately affect the client experience.
• Compliance regulation:
  How the data is logged and handled by the client partner is important to avoid legal consequences. Particularly for healthcare, insurance, and other such confidential industries, it is crucial for the client partner to be compliant with laws and regulations.
• Redundant client partners:
  Without a playbook, it is hard to make sure that the client partners are being effectively utilized with their client accounts. Such organizations might hire more client partners than necessary, leading to additional costs for the company.

How can a playbook help client partners?

A playbook would be the answer to organizing the training, process, tools, and roles of a client partner. To the degree that client partners would know exactly what they would have to do and how in any given situation. Here is a list of ways a client partner’s playbook can help companies:

• Better customer relationships:
  A playbook can significantly transform client partners’ engagement with their key accounts. It can guide client partners with a strategic schedule, depth of discussions, and questions they must ask to understand clients better.
  Such an approach to client relationships is strategic and consistent and reflects the company’s seriousness toward its customer experience. It can be a cornerstone to building the role of a client partner.
• Higher client retention & CLV
  There is a 60% to 70% probability of an existing customer buying another product/service from a company. A client partner’s key goal is to improve rapport with clients. A better connection and engagement with clients results in a higher client retention rate.
  Better client retention results in further purchases from a client and generate higher customer lifetime value. This can be a key performance indicator of the client partner’s job effectiveness and results in higher revenue for the company and strong growth trends.
• Upselling to the client
  With a well-defined protocol, the client partner stays in close touch with their key accounts. A good client engagement allows client partners to understand the client’s goals and add further value to them through upselling and cross-selling.
• Generating business through referrals
  Proven metrics to improve customer satisfaction will also compel clients to spread the word. Better client satisfaction practices mean better revenue through word-of-mouth. It would open a whole new sales channel for any business.
• Effective resolution of client escalations
  Client partners are often the first person to hear an escalation from clients. Active efforts to capture client issues and resolve them in a timely and satisfactory way can be a crucial gift from a client partner playbook.
• Reducing client churning
  Client churning can leave a company stuck at a crossroads to grab more sales as existing clients leave. A well-defined approach to working closely with the client would reduce the churning rate and ensure that customers stick around.
• Higher closure ratio
  Often, client partners work side by side with the clients to ensure that they help them define needs with clarity. A playbook would be an articulate guide to provide a crystal clear stepwise plan that leads to more sales conversion.

To conclude, such a framework would work wonders when it comes to the decisiveness and efficiency of client partners. It increases overall output for the employees and brings more revenue to the company.

Your guide to creating a client partner’s playbook

Here is a detailed on how you can work on creating your unique playbook that would guide your client partners:

• Start by evaluating your current situation
  Understand the current practices and loopholes in client satisfaction. You can also start by asking your clients where to improve and focus on defining the weaknesses effectively in order to resolve them through a playbook.
• Define the role of client partners and the objective of a playbook
  You must first be clear about the priorities of your client partners and their KPIs so that the objective of your playbook aligns with it. Whether it is reducing churn rate or improving cross-selling, a clear goal would allow the playbook to be effective.
• Understand the customer diligently
  Before your playbook can help client partners understand better, you must understand your clients. Knowing the clients will help you define a clear set of communication practices and etiquette to get along with their personas.
• Collecting feedback from different teams
  Your sales, marketing, customer service, and product teams have a very vivid idea of different objections or thoughts clients may have. A merge of their thoughts in the playbook would help make the document well-versed for any different situations down the road.
• Defining the process
  Decisiveness from client partners can help win the trust and confidence of the client. As such, it is crucial to cover different SOPs that can be used for client feedback collection, cross-selling, client onboarding, and complaint management.
• Covering communication plan
  Client partners should also get to know a clear, well-defined process of communicating with clients. Your playbook can cover the ideal channel of communication depending on the subject matter. It can also include frequency and standard format to communicate.
• Defining the training plan
  Training the client partners is a very important part of their onboarding. A playbook should also cover how to train and educate your team so that they can work with your clients effectively without any hiccups.
• Implementing and measuring the follow-through
  It is critical to measure if your client partners are following through the playbook’s practices and instructions. It can be a regular process after careful implementation. Collecting client feedback can be helpful over here to see how your client partner is treating your clients.
• Testing and improving the playbook
  The implementation of a client partner’s playbook would eventually lead to a set of feedback from clients and client partners. It would help customize and personalize the playbook further for better results.
• Testing and improving the playbook
  The playbook would also be resourceful to align your customer service staff by conveying the company’s values, vision, and mission. This would help client partners represent the company’s brand identity to the clients through their tone and communication.
• Covering the brand’s tone, voice, vision, and mission
  The playbook would also be resourceful to align your customer service staff by conveying the company’s values, vision, and mission. This would help client partners represent the company’s brand identity to the clients through their tone and communication.

What is a client partner’s playbook template?

A template for a client partner playbook can help share a framework that companies can refer to when they go for creating a playbook. A template would not only help with a clear starting point but will also help organizations define a detailed playbook through a definitive set of items to cover.

Using a free template and then refining or customizing it with your internal client service team can help you save a lot of time and research on creating a client partner’s playbook.

Get your free Key Account Management Playbook template today!

SmartKarrot offers a set of proven templates that you and your team of client partners can browse through today. It will help you get a better hold of your key clients’ satisfaction and generate more revenue from your existing client base!

WRITTEN BYRakhin V

Rakhin has over 10 years of experience driving business development and client services. In his prior roles, he stayed close to customers to understand their requirements and help them achieve their business goals. He is passionate about customer success.

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