Client relationships are a matter of managing every potential issue before it occurs and taking care of it.
This sort of attention to relationships will put you out in font of a lot of problems.
Unfortunately, in every relationship the client will have parties who ar short sighted or who simply want the relationshiop to fail; they hate vendors, they don't like your service, whatever.
These people can be counted on to manufacture or exacerbate problems with the sole intent of making th vendor look bad.
Every relationship requires leadership who intends to actually make the relationship work, and will share information correctly to make that a reality. Neither party is always right, nor can a vendor be effective if they are expected to bend over backward to please a client every time the wind blows.
A good vendor makes a client better at core operations, rather than just performing a service. To do this, the vendor often has to break the client of unhealthy behavior, which pisses people off at the client, bringing us back to the "asshole employee who makes the vendor look bad whenever possible" problem.
Thus, a client leader has to be willing to accept feedback from a vendor, admit that just because they are the client they are NOT always right, and be willing to police themselves internally.
I am involved in some pretty freaking big client-vendor relationships.
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