Great service is the pillar of every business and one can achieve success and maintain it only through quality service. A host of techniques contributes to business success but the foundation of every business is quality work. Only quality can make a business move along. Offering great service is as important for employees as it is for an entire business. This is true for both salaried and freelance employees. As long as you are providing good quality service your value will be acknowledged; if you fail to maintain this quality you will go out of business. Even if one encounters a successful break by chance, to maintain that success you need great service because opportunities for success are not continuous.

The main goal of employees is to satisfy clients by offering good service. While good service helps salaried employees gain success in their growth within an enterprise, freelancers build their reputation and gain future projects through good service. Therefore, it is very important to offer good service to your clients. Only quality service can be the strong base of a successful business.

To start with, good quality is simple but maintaining that quality throughout your work is difficult. Sometimes too much work might hamper your quality, and at times less time dedication may lead to bad quality. This article discusses the importance of great service and guides you in delivering great service and maintaining it throughout.

Importance of quality service

Delivering quality service is a necessity for employees to satisfy their employers and keep their jobs. For freelancers, it is more important, as quality work can only get them good work and let them get going with their freelancing. Most freelancers work on a project basis from the cozy comfort of their homes. Therefore, only when they provide quality service to their clients and satisfy them, will they be able to gain future projects; the moment they fail to deliver great service, their chances of gaining future projects decrease. Below are some of the benefits a freelancer gains by delivering great service:

• Trust between clients and employee: As a freelancer, you are solely responsible for your work; therefore your work quality adds value to your independent identity as a freelancer. Great service keeps your clients satisfied, which helps them build trust in you. They will find you reliable and give you more freedom in your work to allow you to add your own ideas. This will help you to work freely and more creatively as your clients will reduce their queries.
• Increased referrals: When you offer quality work you leave a mark on your clients and impress them. And when they find you reliable, they will not hesitate to refer you to their friends and colleagues. Therefore, quality work will increase referrals for you and help you grow further in your work.
• More work projects: Quality work will not only satisfy your clients but also build a good name for you. It will help you to create a reputation in the professional world and make your name a brand in your circle. Your value will be acknowledged and you will be offered more work projects. Your quality work will also help you earn future projects.

Therefore, all the basic needs for you to have control over your job depend on your work quality. It fulfills your client’s needs and helps you to earn future projects. Maintaining good quality is not that difficult unless you intentionally compromise your standards, which can ruin your standing. Once creating great quality becomes a habit, you will be familiar with the flow and move along well with it. You should be very careful in improving your quality; maintain consistency in your work at least so you continue to satisfy your clients’ requirements. While great work will bring you more work, failure to do so might also lose you potential projects. Therefore, delivering great service is not just important for you to gain success but also to maintain your job.

Factors to offer good service

After realizing the importance of delivering good service it is clear that maintaining good service is a necessity for every job. Good service includes more than just good work. It goes beyond just offering good work and comprises maintaining professional etiquette, being conscious of deadlines, and maintaining a good client-employee relationship. For example:
when a restaurant is said to offer good service, this means that along with good food, the restaurant offers a proper environment, hospitable staff, and food that is served with decorum. Similarly, when a freelancer is supposed to offer good service to a client, he or she has to offer good all-round service. Below are the major elements or factors that should be considered to ensure your clients get great service.

• Satisfy clients’ expectations
• Maintain work quality
• Offer high availability
• Maintain professional etiquette
• Communicate well with clients
• Be deadline conscious
• Be honest at all times

The above-mentioned elements are important for offering good service to clients and all should be followed. Even avoiding one factor is not an option as all seven are important. Now let’s discuss these elements in detail so you can understand how to offer great service and satisfy your clients.

Satisfy clients’ expectations

Every employee should aim to satisfy clients. You should first understand your clients’ expectations and then satisfy them. Understanding a client’s expectations is very simple. Along with providing quality work in estimated time, your client will expect you to be honest and fair in business. You will be expected to be responsible towards the work and communicate actively. You will also be expected to offer new ideas and be creative. You should maintain all these and thus satisfy your clients’ expectations. Try to estimate the time you require to finish a particular job, then clearly inform your client about the timelines. Finish the job before the deadline and provide great quality work at the end of the project. In the meantime, be in regular contact with your clients and respond to their feedbacks and comments.

Be upfront about everything, whether it be a job, budget, or time issue. Don’t make fake promises because it will be difficult for you to continue with such promises. Therefore, remain honest in your business and maintain a healthy relationship with your clients. Be consistent with your service from the beginning until the end. Maintaining all these attributes will help you satisfy your clients’ expectations.

Maintain work quality

Maintaining work quality is very important to impress clients. Quality of work is vital to ensure great service; therefore make sure you provide perfect quality work throughout your tenure of a project. Do not compromise with your work because your reputation depends on the quality of work you provide. To maintain work quality, it is important you dedicate enough time and concentration to the work. When you are freelancing, you choose to work from your own comfort zone and therefore, unlike an office environment, you have to be responsible about your timelines. As you will be working from your own space, there can be many distractions. Therefore, make sure you divide your work time accordingly and maintain it strictly so you can concentrate fully on the job at hand. If you fail to manage it from the beginning, you will not be able to satisfy clients’ expectations. This might cause last-minute hurry, which will again hamper your work. Therefore, maintain your time properly and come out with quality work for your client.

Try to finish one job at a time, and then take on another job. This will help you focus on a particular job and not be distracted from producing quality work. However, if you feel you are capable of handling more than one project at a time, make sure you allocate separate working hours for both jobs and apply your dedication to the job you are working on. This will help you to maintain quality on both projects. Too much work and insufficient time are the main reasons why quality is compromised, so it is important to balance your work and time. Also develop the habit of monitoring the entire job after completing it, before you submit it to your clients. You should also keep backups of every job so you do not encounter any job-related problems during the project. Maintaining the quality of your work will build trust among your clients and enhance your future prospects. Ongoing quality is the real mantra for offering great service.

Offer high availability

It is very important to offer high availability to clients in order to stay in the race of the professional world. Offering high availability means being responsive towards your clients’ emails and calls, and providing them service as they need it. To do this, you have to be active with your email check up and phone calls. Make sure you receive your clients’ calls, and if you miss any, make sure you get back to them soon. The same goes for emails. You have to be active with your inbox and be responsive to your clients’ queries and expectations. When you are dealing with a particular client make sure you make the client feel important and that you are solely at his/her service. You will be having more than one client and it is your responsibility to handle them in your ways.

All the above facts may sound that you are becoming a slave to work. But you can make the task easier by establishing an understanding between your clients and yourself. At the beginning of the job, make sure you are clear about your timelines. Check your emails at regular intervals and respond to your clients. Regarding phone calls, from the initial stage of the job divide your time between work and play and make this division clear to your client. Speak upfront about your timelines and do not hesitate to say you will not entertain calls during your play time unless they are urgent. This will help you by making your terms clear to your clients, and they will not hamper you with calls anytime. However, during peak times you might have to work beyond your normal times. Be prepared to compromise with such situations as they are the part of your work. Therefore, maintain high availability for clients without hampering your personal life.

To ensure you respond punctually to emails, set alarms for new emails and unsubscribe unwanted email notifications to avoid distractions from work. Also check your inbox at regular intervals to keep updated on any new developments with your clients’ requirements. Ensure you are not spending too much time on your emails. You should respond to your clients’ mails regularly and not make them feel ignored. Be sure you are at their service whenever they need it. You can adopt one easy way to create a balance between your work time and play time and still maintain availability to your clients. Mention your business time and email address on your voice mail messages. This will help your client know about your times and that you are not avoiding their work. This will help both you and your client. At times there will be real urgent work for clients; during such situations do not your clients down. Make sure you meet their needs ? your extra effort and work will count in building a healthy relationship. Whenever you are going on a planned holiday, make sure you inform your clients about such plans ahead of time. When the plan is an urgent one, try to leave a mail or message for your clients informing them about your unavailability, and mention the seriousness of your situation. Offer quality work and high availability to your clients without hampering your personal life.

Maintain professional etiquette

Maintaining professional etiquette is very important for every person in the professional world. Professional etiquette includes attending to phone calls properly and responding to email queries on time. We mention above the need to respond to emails and calls. Now, let’s look at other etiquette that should be maintained in a profession. Make sure you respect your clients’ needs and their time. Maintain courtesy and respect towards your clients.

Suppose you have an urgent query, and you need to clarify it with your client, which requires you to call your client out of office hours. At such times, practice the courtesy of asking whether the client is free and comfortable to answer your queries at that particular time. If the client says yes, you can continue with your query; if the answer is no, contact the client at a more convenient time and accept the arrangement courteously. Be polite in your communication and make sure you never speak about your clients in a derogatory manner in front of anyone. If you are facing any problem, rather clarify it with your client than gossip about it behind the client’s back. Respect your clients’ demands and attend to their requirements properly. Be a good listener and attach importance to your clients’ talk. Do not make your clients feel you are not paying heed to their talk and are leaving them unattended. Practice humility, courtesy, and respect in order to provide great service.

Communicate well with clients

It is very important to communicate well with your clients. In the above sections, we often refer to the importance of communicating frankly with clients. While communicating properly with your clients, there are certain aspects that should be followed. Below are these aspects:

• Gain control over your communicating language so you do not face any language problems while communicating with your clients.
• Clarify your timelines and working capabilities with your clients.
• Be an active listener to understand your clients’ needs and expectations.
• Maintain frankness and honesty in communicating with your clients.
• Be active with your emails and phone calls and respond to your clients’ requirements on time.

These are aspects of communication you should maintain in dealing with your clients. Communication can never be one-sided and therefore, along with being an active speaker, be an active listener. Whenever you are communicating with your clients, make sure you build a conversation and allow your clients to have their say as well. Remember to be clear and straight in your conversation so there are no hindrances regarding your communication with your clients. Maintain all these aspects and communicate well with your clients.

Be deadline conscious

To offer great service to clients it is important to be deadline conscious. Every project needs to be completed within a particular time. You need to understand the seriousness of deadlines and be particular about the fact that you complete clients’ work on time. Make sure you clarify your required time with your clients before taking on a project. After you commit to a job within a period of time, it becomes your responsibility to complete it within that time. Try to complete one job within a time and even if you are dealing with more than one job make sure you complete both jobs on time.

Make sure you maintain your work time strictly to avoid last-minute rushes. Do not compromise your work quality to complete work before deadline. Be deadline conscious and maintain work quality in order to offer great service to your clients.

Maintain honesty

Honesty is one of the most important things that should be adopted to succeed in business. Try to be honest with your clients to create a healthy relationship with them. If you think the time given to you is not enough speak about it and be honest in expressing that the time is insufficient to complete the job. Avoid making fake promises because such promises will bring problems back to you in future. Therefore, be honest while dealing with your clients.

These are some of the considerations that should be borne in mind to offer great service to your clients. Besides these factors, be proactive in your service, manage your project well, and follow a well-planned schedule to complete your work. Also be sure to keep backups of your work. Do not hesitate to discuss your work plan with your clients and ask them for ideas whenever you feel the need to. Try to understand your clients’ requirements and resolve all their issues properly. Consider your clients’ expectations as the first priority. Always try to learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat them in future. Follow all these elements while dealing with your clients to ensure great service and satisfaction with the final result.

Image Credits

• Deadlines
• Businessman sitting at office