The importance of client care…
Creating happy, sustainable and robust relationships with your clients is one of the most important elements of a successful business. Nurturing and building those relationships will lead to loyalty, repeat business, recommendations and in some cases, even friendship. The time, energy and ultimately the cost of getting new business, compared to developing existing relationships is enormous. According to Bain & Company, “it costs 6–7 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one.”
For over twenty years, I have worked with businesses to raise their profile with impact and meaningful marketing campaigns. I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time on the phone building relationships with potential clients. Many of the relationships I built, started as a cold call and turned into a profitable client… but it’s a very slow burn process and ultimately a very costly way of getting business. “The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5–20%” — Marketing Metrics.
No-one particularly likes cold calling; not the caller nor the receiver. I would only do a cold call if I knew that I could add value to the recipient of the call, by offering something such as a white paper or an invitation to an event. So, having an excellent marketing campaign is one of the main building blocks to establishing good business relationships.
By far the most rewarding work I have done is building upon existing client relationships. Ensuring clients are satisfied, appreciated and by understanding their pain points and then disseminating these internally, leads to a better service for the client. This has saved and developed many client relationships and built a loyalty and trust with the companies I have worked with.
By embracing feedback from all one’s clients can lead to an improvement in business overall. This is undeniably a win win for all parties.
In today’s evolving, ever more automated environments what constitutes customer experience? Should we not be considering the ‘human experience’ and strip away some of the digital interactions we so easily undertake? All too often we hide behind technology, but this merely masks the customers frustrations and by building human relationships we empower ourselves to improve situations that digital interactions simply cannot resolve. We need to get back to treating the customer like a human being and interact in a more proactive human way. People need to stop hiding behind their computers and pick up the phone or meet their customers in person more!
One of the problems for many businesses is that they spend most of their time and effort developing and delivering a product or a service, which is understandable, but by not giving the human attention that may be required to keep the client happy and loyal they may lose the client in the future. Even if the business is good at nurturing the client when they are in front of them; what happens to the client once the project is complete? The client is often forgotten as they move onto the next project.
By incorporating a robust client care system with regular contact, from the offset, means it’s highly likely you’ll keep that client relationship alive long after the initial project is forgotten. Appreciation and empathy are critical to enable an easily accessible, open two-way dialogue regarding your services and issue resolutions as well as keeping you in the forefront of their minds for future projects. They are also much more likely to recommend you to others. “Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4–6 people about their experience,” according to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs.
I work with companies to develop tailored client care processes. My goal is to help my clients have happier customers, who are not only loyal, but who become advocates that will recommend you and your services.
If you have any particularly good examples of how your client care processes worked, please do share or if you’d like to have a chat about how to set up a client care system, please feel free to get in touch.
Remeny Armitage 13/02/19
