Every entrepreneur dreads losing a client. Losing a client can affect your cash flow, payables, receivables, and sales projection. When you lose a big client, the number of profits you lose could have a lasting impact on the financial health of your business.
Every day you spend time and effort to ensure that your customers are happy and thriving. You are constantly brainstorming on new ideas and products to keep your customers satisfied and maintain a high retention rate. However, even with the best efforts and working with a successful team, you can still lose customers. Here are tips to help you not lose a client again.
Don’t Make Mistakes Twice
Losing a client means missing an opportunity to make money. However, you can still benefit from it by finding out why your customer left to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Angry and dissatisfied customers can be a powerful customer knowledge tool. Therefore, take advantage of the honest feedback from your client and ensure that you determine the reasons for their leaving.
If you decide to send out surveys, keep them short, polite, and easy to fill out. Structure your surveys to look like honest attempts to better your products and services and avoid making it look like a sales pitch or an email asking more from them.
It must have cost you much to bring a client on board. To make sure that you don’t lose them again you have to move past delivering the bare minimum and focus on making your customers happy and gaining their loyalty. Nurture your employees to generate loyal clients, recognize why you lost previous customers, and understand each customer’s needs and goals. Consider setting realistic expectations about your products and services.
Keep the Door Open
Just because you’ve lost a client today, doesn’t mean that the client will never come back or refer someone else. Let your client know that they’re always welcome and assure them that you shall make necessary improvements to keep them happy.
Make sure that your clients know how much you appreciate the opportunity to serve them. End your relationship on a positive note and keep the door open for referrals from the client you just lost. Your client deserves appreciation because of the support they gave you.
Boost Client Relationships
Buyer-seller relationships are built on trust. A customer has to trust your products or service to give you their money. Losing one customer’s trust could mean others are suffering too, hence the need to boost client relationships.
Review the way your employees handle client relationships and accounts and make necessary adjustments. Reviewing procedures is good for your business as it keeps you up with the latest technology and regulations and keeps you consistent with the industry’s best practices. Consider implementing processes and systems such as CRM for effective management of clients’ data and communications.
Improve Processes
Customer retention improves your business’s profitability. When processes work well, they improve customer retention, efficiency, and productivity. The success of your business in the digital era relies heavily on your willingness to redefine your processes, what you sell, and how your team operates.
You can make improvements to your processes through automation. Automation frees up time for your team so that they have enough time to nurture better client relationships. Consider using project management tools to make tracking and addressing customer issues quicker and easier.
Project management tools are key to customer relationship management. The tools can help you navigate around common communication barriers and foster professionalism and a positive client experience. A project management tool can also help you see issues even before they arise and help you avoid further client losses.
Don’t Dwell
Customers leave for various reasons. While collecting feedback, be receptive to the kind of feedback you get and make the best out of them. There will always be customers who leave and give biased, irrational, or emotional feedback. However, this should not pull you down.
Always remember that what a customer says about your products and services is important and relevant to your business no matter what. Keep moving forward and don’t forget the accomplishments and successes you have encountered despite the loss. It is normal to feel frustrated and angry. But for you to learn from the experience, move past the negativity, and try to make sense out of what happened.
Get Back on Your Feet
Rarely do businesses have a perfect record of customer retention. With time, even your best customers can eventually move on even with good performance from your end. Therefore, If you ever find yourself in a tough spot after losing a customer, do all you can to get back on your feet and even look for new opportunities.
