Taking care of your clients has never been so important in this age when competition is ripe and your clients can easily buy from another vendor. Brand loyalty has immeasurable value are new companies continue to saturate more established markets.
Here are 10 reasons your business will progress as you take good care of the clients that you currently have.
1. Loyal Clients Refer Other Clients
Word of mouth advertising is one of the powerful ways to gain new clients. Scientists who study market psychology call this social proof. When someone you know and trust recommends a product, service or brand, that is a much more powerful motivator to buy than the messaging that comes directly from the company.
When you have clients that get value from your business and they are excited about what you’re offering, they will naturally share that with others. Now with the amplification of social media, one client may be able to broadcast your brand to thousands of people with a click of a mouse.
2. Personal Fulfillment
Every successful entrepreneur knows that once you get to a certain level of prosperity, the money doesn’t matter anymore. They become merely points on a board. What many discover is that they begin to experience an emptiness and void on the inside from having made a ton of money and yet they are still not happy.
Many find their fulfillment by serving people, even within their business context. Many shifts from merely making money, to genuinely serving their customers needs. When that shift takes place from taking care of yourself to taking care of your clients, it creates an internal fulfillment that cannot be bought. The irony is that this will actually fuel growth and more clients.
Ultimately, when your brand becomes known for authentically taking care of their clients, more people will want to become your clients.
3. Fulfilled Employees
Everyone wants a mission in life, a purpose that is higher than themselves. That includes your employees. Yes, they want to make money. But they also want to make a difference.
You’d be shocked at how many people are willing to take a cut in pay in order to do work that matters. And then your company is genuinely taking care of your clients and making a difference in their lives, your employees will feel the weight of that and engage at a level that you cannot buy with money.
4. Honest Customer Feedback
Companies exist to meet market demand. When that ceases to happen, so does the company’s revenue. That’s why companies spend billions of dollars a year trying to get feedback from their customers.
When you take care of your clients, you will have a natural and organic relationship with them. You should still do the focus groups, surveys and social listening, but ultimately, your relationship with them will open up lines of communications that a structure environment like a focus group cannot replicate.
5. Established Market For New Offerings
Technology is moving at lightning speeds. That’s creating new innovations, new markets and new opportunities to expand your offerings.
When there’s a new demand in your market that you can supply, your current customer base should be the first place you go to sell. If you have taken care of your clients all along, they will be excited to buy from you.
6. Competitive Intelligence
Loyal customers will let you know how your competitors are marketing to them. In larger companies where they may use multiple vendors for similar solutions, loyal clients will give you the inside scoop to have a competitive edge.
Sometimes large companies are required to create bid-offs with multiple vendors, even if there is a preferred vendor. If you have taken care of your clients, they will give you the insider information you need to win those bids.
7. Client Retention and Turnover
Losing clients are extremely costly. Companies spend an enormous amount of money to market and sell to acquire new clients. Some companies spend as much as 50% of their revenue for customer acquisition.
Marketing is costly. When you lose a client, not only do you have to re-market to them, it’s also unlikely you’ll get them back if they’ve had a bad experience with your brand. That’s a potential revenue stream that’s lost forever.
According to this study by Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention by even 5% can improve your profits by 25-95%.
8. Increase Average Sales per Client
By taking care of your clients, you’ll inherently increase your average revenue per customer. When you’re responsive to a client, it keeps your brand and offerings in front of them. In marketing terms, you get more brand impressions.
It’s simply a numbers game. The more engagement and interaction you have with your client, the more likely that think of you and what you offer. That’s why many companies are starting to use automated responses to streamline customer contacts. Automating allows quick responses as well as consistency.
Rich Lamendola from brandbliss says that using automated responses to messages or email from customers is most effective when you reply within twenty-four hours and also include links back to new products or promotions on your site. That level of service will create the ‘wow’ factor you need to create loyal clients.
Even if the message is automated, if the content you’re sending them is quick and relevant to what they’re looking for, it’ll cause your company to stand out. It will also keep the customers from looking elsewhere.
9. New Opportunity Discovery
In addition, when you take care of your clients and engage them regularly, you also find out additional needs they have that your company can meet. If all you’re doing is selling them what they think they need, you’ll have a lot of one-off sales.
Most good sales people are taught to do a discovery session with potential clients to learn what their true needs are. Very often, customers come in uneducated about the ecosystem of solutions you offer. That means they may not know what they actually need.
When you care enough about your client to do a thorough discovery session, not only might you find a better solution for them, you may find that they need more than they initially thought. Either way, you will gain a client where you have fully met their real needs, and they will be grateful that you spent the time and energy to do that. You have just created a loyal customer.
10. Legacy and Impact
We’ve mentioned it before, but successful businesses think more about impact than they do the bottom line. If the basic fundamental values of your company doesn’t revolve around taking care of your clients, it’ll be a soul-less organization that won’t have an impact and leave a long term legacy.
Taking care of your clients has an immeasurable ROI. If you do it well, your company will have a difficult time not growing, and not becoming successful.