Review Robin recently put together a comprehensive post about how to manage client expectations.
The title promises nine tips, but that’s a bit of an undersell. Compiling advice from a wide variety of marketing industry professionals, the piece features 32 (!) quotes dividing into nine tip sections. Each quote deals with a specific aspect of managing client expectations.
Here’s Juliana’s advice, under “Be clear on the deliverables”:
Write a communication policy. You’ll find that some clients expect a response within minutes and others within weeks. Let them know up front what your communication policy is. Get your policy down in writing and send it to new clients when they sign up for your services. Then you can politely remind them of the policy when needed. Be sure to include in your policy what your response time would be for an emergency situation — and what your definition of an emergency situation is (e.g., site outage; issues causing business disruption).
Check out what the rest of the experts had to say here.